Public Relations - Sherlock Holmes

What is it? ‘Black (1993) maintains that PR is planned in an effort to create goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics’

(Black, S. (1993) The essentials of public relations. Kogan Page)

(Masterman & Wood. (2006) Innovative marketing communications. Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann)

The uses of PR

-Customer retention

-Investment

-Bargaining status

-staff relations

-business development

Functions of PR

-opinion forming

-internal relations

-participants

-public official liaison

-community relations

-product support

-financial relations

-crisis management

-press, television and radio relations

(Masterman & Wood. Innovative marketing communications, 2006. pgs88-92)

Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes would use public relations to create awareness for the movie. I’ve come to this conclusion because movies need viewers to come to watch the movie in the cinema, and also attend the premier event that always occur before the official date of the movies release.

Sherlock Holmes to the running up-to the event have used the media to make the public aware. This mainly includes promotional work on tv shows, news articles, personal information that would inevitably link to the movie (without them having to say anything about the movie, journalists provide a promotional tools by simply linking these actors and actresses to the movie).

The above screen print contains an interview from the cast of Sherlock Holmes, I'm not able to upload it but this is the link: http://bcove.me/ajn7unrd

These are just some examples of PR that have been done by the Sherlock Holmes cast. A constant example of PR would be the continuous updates about the movie on facebook for their official page. 2,154,098 have liked this page whilst 78,462 have talked about this movie; these states were taken on Sunday 4^th December 2011 which has increased since then.

Their public relations team concentrate on garnering viewers to watch the movie in the cinema, this is because the success of the film, beside the reviews written by people, are also based on the income for the opening weekend/week of the movie and whether they have doubled or tripled the money spent for making the movie. The entertainment industry is a business like any other but take more risks as they can never know whether a movie will be a hit or an epic fail.