Conclusions and future directions

Public relations practitioners and scholars see themselves continuing the tradition of creating and studying powerful ideas that tell emotionally-compelling stories across time and space. Understanding in more detail the way the visual, material and the experiential nature of strategic communication is deployed is vital – both in terms of evolving effective practice as well as being able to adequately analyse and critique such approaches. Validating the importance of public relations and strategic communications scholars paying attention to the pre-communicative context is evidence from wider marketing research demonstrating that visual priming has strong links with information processing. Priming plays an important role in helping to encourage the understanding, retention and cognition of information in receivers. There are both challenges and opportunities for public relations and strategic communication practice and scholarship. For practice, there is a framework and emerging creative space within which strategies can be planned and implemented that embrace visual, spatial and potentially – other multi-sensory forms of communication.