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Cultivating celebrity through public relations

Although there has been an increase in research on celebrity, Turner (2010, p. 13) argues that there is not a ‘great deal of depth or variety in academic writing’. He believes that there needs to be more analysis on celebrity, particularly how it is understood as an industry. One of the areas of the celebrity industry that certainly deserves more attention is the role of communication, and more particularly public relations. This is not to say that communication, or public relations, is ignored in previous research, just underdeveloped. Celebrities communicate with the public through both their primary medium (i.e. film, radio, reality television, etc.) and also an extra-textual dimension that includes interviews, award nights, social media and premieres, to name a few (Marshall 2010). This extra-textual dimension is really a form of public relations meant to create and sustain relationships. Accordingly, this article focuses on the idea that celebrity public relations has emerged as an inclusive field of communicative practice and that there are fruitful directions to be taken up when academic attention is focused on understanding the field. When Boorstin (1975, p. 57) pointed out that a ‘celebrity is a person who is known for his well knownness’ he seemed to have provided a straightforward definition. Yet as the study of celebrity increased, and more information about celebrities became available, the definition of celebrity grew to be truly ambiguous (Marshall 1997). This is because, as Milner (2010) explains, celebrity is qualitatively different depending on the approach taken to understand the phenomenon. Overall, however, there is an underlying thread among the ways theorists view celebrity: celebrities are individuals selected by the public (see Marshall 1997, Rojek 2001, Currid-Halkett 2010). In other words, celebrity is about choice – the choice the public makes on certain individuals. What is undervalued in celebrity studies is the role communication plays in cultivating the context where choice is made. Communication is ‘directed not toward the extension of messages in space but toward the maintenance of society in time’ (Carey 1989, p. 18). In other words, communication creates social reality (Craig 1999) and thus the opportunity for selection. To this end, we can delve even deeper into the way that communication cultivates celebrity by focusing on a particular form: public relations. According to Grunig and Hunt (1984), public relations is the management of communication between an entity and its publics. Although the definition creates an understanding of the function and purpose of public relations, it does not allow for the discipline to extend beyond the boundaries of the technical level (Bowen 2003). To overcome this ideological confusion, public relations has moved toward a more focused and concentrated style, or styles, of communication.