Public Relations in Vietnam: The Development under the Doi Moi Policy

Public relations (PR) practice in Vietnam is an area largely unexplored by PR scholars and practitioners alike. With the country’s rapid economic development in the last two decades and the growing international interest in doing business in Vietnam, there is a pressing need to fill the gap. This paper incorporates new and existing resource materials from various disciplines such as public policy, intercultural communication and business management to provide a detailed country profile to familiarise readers with the context of practising PR in Vietnam. To understand the development of PR in Vietnam, one first must understand the changes in the global environmental context of the profession. In this paper, five environmental variables identified in the Excellence Project (Grunig and Dozier, 1992) are applied—economic development, political landscape, activism, societal and corporate cultures, as well as media system. This paper will also explain how each of these developments has affected the growth and status of PR in Vietnam, illustrated by specific examples of PR in practice in the country.