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The paper traces negative and limiting media depictions of public relations (PR) to their origins in the 1920s in order to determine whether modern media characterizations of “public relations” are new or a legacy of the past.

A qualitative content analysis was used in order to look more deeply at media characterizations of public relations. The New York Times and Time magazine were chosen to sample because of their dominance and unique reflection of the era, respectively.

Reporting about “public relations” was primarily fair. Early practitioners were often quoted defining the profession, including “great men” of PR history and more common practitioners. These practitioners of PR are as much to blame for confounding the terms “public relations” and “press agent” as are the media of the 1920s.

This historical study sheds a light on and provides context for both the media and society's understanding of public relations today.

While much research has looked at media portrayals and public perceptions of the public relations field, few if any have traced attitudes about the profession to the decade when the term “public relations” was first popularized. The paper remedies this deficit.

Who started it we will never know. But from the birth of newspapers, advertisers realised that the third party endorsement of apparently independent editorial reporting delivered their message more cheaply – and arguably more credibly – than paid advertising. Thus in the 17th century the publicist was born to service “the fellow who cannot lye sufficiently himself [who] gets one of these to do’t for him”. Any history of public relations is a running commentary on the techniques used to deliver third party endorsement as the media has evolved: from Ivy Lee’s simple packaging of information approach, through Bernays’ “engineering consent”, to today’s use of bloggers on the web or the more sophisticated “journo lobbying”, it is a record of how practitioners deliver public relations’ unique selling proposition, the plausible deniability which is third party endorsement.

With a burgeoning stream of online choices, fostering customer loyalty is a constant challenge. Companies must become masters of the new “nonstop customer” experience. They will at times have to analyze the data on their customers' behavior for new opportunities, and at other times directly influence their customers' choices.

Customers continue to escape from traditional marketing channels into digital realms where they can become more knowledgeable and empowered than they have been in the past. So the nonstop-customer experience model uniquely places evaluation, not purchase, at its center.

The article offers a new rule number one of marketing is: know your customer's behavior on their path to purchase.

To understand what customer journeys are being taken by customers, the model groups loyalty behaviors into four general archetypes: emotional loyalty, inertia-based loyalty, conditional loyalty and true deal chasing.

The article proposes that marketing departments act on the insight they gain from analyzing their customers in terms of the four loyalty profiles in two ways: by sometimes reinforcing customer behaviors, and at other times redirecting them.

This paper aims to explore the concept of public relations in the progressive era to gain a greater understanding of the historical development of corporate public relations in the USA.

The paper provides historical analysis of 87 magazine articles dating from 1900 to 1917, which discussed press agentry, publicity, and public relations.

In the early 1900s, publicity meant both legal requirements of corporate disclosure and press exposure of secret corporate activities. The purpose of publicity was to reveal excess and corruption. The term press agent was used in two ways. First, it was used to refer to literary and theatrical press agents, and second, it was used interchangeably with publicity agent to signify individuals hired by corporations to respond to the publicity and explain corporate policies to the public. By the second decade of the twentieth century, corporations, specifically the railroads, were using the term public relations to refer to the practice of developing relationships with the public.

Most historical studies of public relations in the USA have described the development of the field as a linear progression or evolution from press agentry, to public information or publicity, to two‐way communication. This study suggests that that linear evolutionary model is only partially accurate. At least some corporations in the progressive era had a greater understanding of the two‐way street than corporations in this period normally are given credit for.

This paper seeks to compare different national PR histories in order to unfold the degree of abstract reflection in PR history writing. It aims to provide some suggestions for a future PR historiography, based on this comparison.

The paper compares British, German, and US American PR historiography. The study is based on a comparison of 36 PR histories. A triple matrix of theoretization is used in order to differentiate the histories.

Within the comparison American PR historiography accounts for 24 public relations history approaches, whereas Great Britain (1) and Germany (11) offer fewer histories. However, this richness in quantity does not lead to theoretical diversification. Owing to the paradigmatic obligation to a progressivist understanding, American PR historiography actually entails only one theoretic approach, while its German equivalent includes three different theoretic approaches and British PR historiography – being at its start – at least contains one explicitly non‐progressivist, methodologically well‐informed, fact‐oriented example. Paradoxically, the prevailing American PR historiography, on the one hand, conceptualizes PR as a modern phenomenon but, on the other hand, claims even ancient beginnings.

The corpus of analysis contains only studies that attempt to supply an encompassing overview of (national) PR history.

Public relations managers may use these findings to achieve a more nuanced critical understanding of the history of their occupation, and thereby reflect on its current state, which may lead to intensified ethical endeavours.

The paper presents a pioneer systematic comparison of the three national PR histories, which may lead to enhanced national and general PR historiography. Another value is the establishment of a theoretically informed comparative measuring instrument, which (in future) can also be applied in order to compare and improve other national PR historiographies.