PR 5.0: A Call for Smart PR Management to Overcome the Digital Trust Crisis

Public Relations (PR) is constantly evolving: within the last 60 years, the concept has developed from the post-war period to the current era of digitization, simultaneously leading to a digital crisis of trust. Against this background, this article introduces a versioning of PR 1.0 to 5.0. The stages of PR are applied to outline smart PR's possibilities and current limits. From today's perspective, the best quality contribution digital PR can make in the crisis of trust is to use outstanding trust technologies beyond its dialogic-co-creative competency. Despite this, the digital age has been characterized as an era of a crisis of trust in brands. Therefore, it is time for the reset of PR. PR 5.0 is a digital trust offensive. With its dialogue and cocreative competencies, the current digital transformation plays into the hands of PR management. Hence, PR is conceptually a good way to support companies in their digital-agile worlds. PR 5.0 can contribute to an increasing corporate internal acceptance of PR.