It involves laying out in detail the various activities and communications that will be employed with reference to the key publics that have been pinpointed in the objectives.
Let us assume, for example, a situation in which an association of home appliance manufacturers finds that the industry has lost standing in the public mind because a substantial number of consumers are dissatisfied with the repair and maintenance services. The industry association identifies, as one of its publics, the retail appliance dealers who are responsible for servicing. The objective with respect to this public is to indoctrinate the dealers in the necessity for providing quality repair services and to provide information to them on the methods by which high quality servicing may be established.
The program plan will outline the activities to be directed toward gaining the support of the dealers for this mutually benefit purpose. It may, for example, call for the preparation of a “code of good service” and of a manual describing the service functions the dealer is expected to perform. Further, this part of the plan may call specifically for a series of dealer meetings in various communities; for special articles to be prepared for trade publications that are circulated among the dealers; for a special periodical to be published by the association especially for the dealer-audience; for paid advertisements in industry publications, addressed to dealers; for the conduct of special training schools for the service people employed by the dealers; or for any combination of these and other techniques, some of which may lie outside the field of public relations must, inevitably, be based on good performance, and it should be noted that all of these measures would be designed to improve performance in repair and maintenance.
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