Justin Mauldin — Founder, Salient PR. Salient runs earned media programmes for technology companies. Figures below come from our own outreach database and are updated quarterly.
“The public” does not exist. There is no single audience out there forming one opinion about you. There are several groups with different stakes in what you do, who notice different things and would need to hear about them differently. That is the whole idea behind the plural, and it is the reason the term is worth the slightly awkward grammar.
Below: what the word means, the five categories textbooks use and what each one implies you should actually do, and the point at which the taxonomy stops helping.
On this page
- What the word means
- The five types, and what each one means for you
- Where the taxonomy stops helping
- Why it matters most during a crisis
- Working out who yours are
- Frequently Asked Questions
What the word means
A public is any group that shares an interest in, or a relationship with, an organisation. Employees are a public. So are customers, investors, regulators, the trade press, and the people who live near your factory.
The useful distinction against “audience” is direction. An audience is defined by you — the people you have decided to talk to. A public defines itself, by having a stake in what you do whether you address it or not. A regulator is a public the moment you are regulated, regardless of whether you have a plan for them.
The practical consequence: you can choose your audiences, and you cannot choose your publics. You can only choose whether you have noticed them.
The five types, and what each one means for you
The standard taxonomy splits publics by how engaged they already are. The categories are more useful as a prompt than as a plan, but the prompt is a good one.
| Type | What it means | What it implies |
|---|---|---|
| Active | Already engaged and informed | They will find your news. Make sure the record is accurate and easy to check. |
| Aroused | Interested, not yet engaged | The group most worth spending on — they are already leaning in. |
| Aware | Know you exist, do not care yet | Needs a reason, not more volume. |
| Inactive | Not engaged, could become so | Usually only becomes active when something goes wrong. Worth knowing they exist before then. |
| Apathetic | No interest | Leave them alone. Most wasted spend is here. |
Most programmes spend the majority of their budget on the aware and apathetic groups, because those are the largest and the easiest to buy access to. The returns are in the aroused group, which is smaller and harder to reach.
Where the taxonomy stops helping
Honestly: these categories are a way of thinking, not a segmentation you can execute against. Nobody has a list of their aroused public. You cannot buy a media list filtered by “interested but not engaged”.
What the framework is genuinely good for is catching the thing everyone does — writing one message for everybody. If you can name which group a piece of communication is for, and accept that the other groups will find it less interesting, you have got the value out of the idea. The rest is academic apparatus.
Why it matters most during a crisis
The distinction earns its keep when something goes wrong, because that is when an inactive public becomes an active one overnight, and when a message written for one group gets read by all of them.
Two things follow. Your employees will read the customer statement, and your customers will read the internal note, so write both as if that is true — it usually is. And whether people accept what you say depends heavily on who says it: the same words from a named executive and from an unattributed statement land differently.
Working out who yours are
Not a research project. Three questions, an hour, a whiteboard.
- Who can stop us? Regulators, large customers, platform owners, an organised group of users. This is the list most companies have never written down.
- Who do we need to say yes? Buyers, candidates, investors, partners.
- Who is already talking about us without us? Communities, forums, trade press, competitors' customers.
Then check whether you have any way of reaching each one that does not depend on them coming to you. Where the answer is no, that is the gap, and it is usually more valuable to close than to add another channel for a group you already reach.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are publics in public relations?
Groups that share an interest in, or a relationship with, an organisation — employees, customers, investors, regulators, the press, neighbours. The plural is deliberate: there is no single public.
What is the difference between a public and a target audience?
You choose an audience. A public has a stake in what you do whether or not you have chosen to address it. You can ignore a public, but you cannot make it not exist.
What are the five types of publics?
Active, aroused, aware, inactive and apathetic, ordered by how engaged they already are. The aroused group — interested but not yet engaged — is usually where effort pays back best.
Are publics the same as stakeholders?
Close enough in everyday use. “Stakeholder” tends to be used for groups with a formal relationship, such as investors and employees; “publics” includes people with no formal relationship at all, such as a community affected by what you do.
Sources
- Kirk Hallahan (2000), Inactive Publics: The Forgotten Publics in Public Relations, for the four-type model this page uses
- Grunig and Hunt's situational theory, for the separate nonpublic / latent / aware / active framework
- Salient PR outreach and coverage records, for the practitioner observations
What our outreach data shows
Between December 2025 and August 2026, 63% of graded replies to our outreach were a yes and 19% were not interested. Across the four company types we measured, response rates — which count auto-replies — sat between 8.2% and 11.4%.
Source: Salient PR outreach database, December 2025 – August 2026.
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“The public” does not exist. What the academic term means, the five categories translated into plain English, and where the taxonomy stops being useful.
