This volume provides a critical look at public relations practice, utilizing case studies from public relations, advertising, and marketing to illustrate the deconstruction and analysis of public relations campaigns. Author Thomas J. Mickey uses a cultural studies approach and demonstrates how it can be used as a critical theory for public relations practice, offering real-world examples to support his argument.
Through the interpretive act of deconstruction, this book serves to challenge the myth of public relations as an objective science, allowing the social importance of public relations to be redefined and encouraging public relations to take a fuller place in the interdisciplinary study of text and knowledge.
Intended for public relations scholars and students in public relations cases/campaigns, public relations criticism, and media studies courses, "Deconstructing Public Relations: Public Relations Criticism" demystifies the act of deconstruction and shows how it can give insight into the theory and practice of public relations.

This volume provides a critical look at public relations practice, utilizing case studies from public relations, advertising, and marketing to illustrate the deconstruction and analysis of public relations campaigns. Author Thomas J. Mickey uses a cultural studies approach and demonstrates how it can be used as a critical theory for public relations practice, offering real-world examples to support his argument.
Through the interpretive act of deconstruction, this book serves to challenge the myth of public relations as an objective science, allowing the social importance of public relations to be redefined and encouraging public relations to take a fuller place in the interdisciplinary study of text and knowledge.
Intended for public relations scholars and students in public relations cases/campaigns, public relations criticism, and media studies courses, "Deconstructing Public Relations: Public Relations Criticism" demystifies the act of deconstruction and shows how it can give insight into the theory and practice of public relations.

A nineteenth-century entrepreneur's bold, innovative marketing helped transform flower gardens into one of America's favorite hobbies. "There is much that is hard and productive of sorrow in this sin-plagued world of ours; and, had we no flowers, I believe existence would be hard to be borne." So states a customer's 1881 letter--one of thousands James Vick regularly received. Vick's business, selling flower seeds through the mail, wasn't unique, but it was wildly successful because he understood better than his rivals how to engage customers' emotions. He sold the love of flowers along with the flower seeds. Vick was genuinely passionate about floriculture, but he also pioneered what we now describe as integrated marketing. He spent a mind-boggling $100,000 per year on advertising (mostly to women, his target demographic); he courted newspaper editors for free publicity; his educational guides presaged today's content marketing; he recruited social influencers to popularize neighborhood gardening clubs; and he developed a visually rich communication and branding strategy to build customer loyalty and inflect their purchasing needs with purchasing desire.

The 1890s saw a revolution in advertising. Cheap paper, faster printing, rural mail delivery, railroad shipping, and chromolithography combined to pave the way for the first modern, mass-produced catalogs. The most prominent of these, reaching American households by the thousands, were seed and nursery catalogs with beautiful pictures of middle-class homes surrounded by sprawling lawns, exotic plants, and the latest garden accessories--in other words, the quintessential English-style garden.
"America's Romance with the English Garden" is the story of tastemakers and homemakers, of savvy businessmen and a growing American middle class eager to buy their products. It's also the story of the beginnings of the modern garden industry, which seduced the masses with its images and fixed the English garden in the mind of the American consumer. Seed and nursery catalogs delivered aspirational images to front doorsteps from California to Maine, and the English garden became the look of America.