Perfecting the Pitch: Exploring the Techniques of Public Relations Pitching (2010)

Undergraduates: B'anca Glenn, Natalie Fioto Sun Young Lee

Faculty Advisor: Craig Carroll
Department: Journalism & Mass Communication

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Public relations practitioners often have their preferred techniques of pitching, which may or may not be reflective in textbooks. Our research

illustrates what public relations practitioners report as their preferred and predominant pitching techniques. It is important that public relations students learn which techniques are being commonly practiced in the public relations field because it will fill in the gaps between real-life application and university education.

We collected our data from in-depth interviews with 167 public relations practitioners and then performed a thematic analysis of the interview

transcripts.

Overall, we found that knowing to whom you are pitching and building personal relationships are the two most frequent responses among our sample. Practitioners acknowledged the importance of interpersonal communication, following up after a pitch and knowledge of the pitch’s content. We also found that a variety of tactics are performed in the pitching process and they consistently reflect the receptors of the pitch.