Each organisation can choose if they want their international PR department to follow a centralised (control) communicational policy or decentralised. The first one would be a model where the parent company’s PR team is responsible for planning campaigns and for the development of communicational policies, procedures and strategies, and the PR departments of the local offices have to follow. The decentralisation, the local PR departments have partial or full autonomy of policy making and planning.
There is another debate in IPR and in many communication disciplines, these are: Standardisation against Adaptation. Standardisation is a uniform approach in the different countries, for example McDonald’s. If you go to a McDonalds in Paris, Japan or Chile you would see the same corporate colours, logo and possible menu, specially the Big Mac. On the other hand, adaptation is a culture-specific approach.
This McDonald’s advert show the diversity of consumers they have and proves you can find the same burger in different countries.
The structure of IPR will depend on the company or organisation, usually smaller multinationals tent to centralise their decision-making.
