Corporate Communication - week 1
What is corporate communication?
Public relations are defined as the function or activity that aims to establish and protect
the reputation of a company or brand, and to create mutual understanding between the
organization and the segments of the public with whom it needs to communicate.
Corporate communication is a management function that offers a framework for the
effective coordination of all internal and external communication with the overall purpose of
establishing and maintaining favorable reputations with stakeholder groups upon which the
organization is dependent.
• The aim of corporate communication is to oversee and coordinate all communication of
the organization.
• It is an integrated approach, based on one mission/vision/corporate identity. This means
multiple specialties are working together.
• Corporate communication is strategic.
• Corporate communication deals with the relations outside the organization.
Organizational communication is the internal communication between management and
employees, and employees, and employees among each other.
Five different approaches to help understand how communication works and why
organizations are communicating.
• Informative approach: Communication is information transmission from a sender to a
receiver.
• Persuasive approach: We acknowledge that communication is intended to have some
effect on people, certain perceptions need to come across, you want to have some effect
on people.
• Relational approach: Both actors are receiver and sender at the same time, relationship
between actors, mutual trust, all the different systems have to work together.
• Interpretive approach: Devotes attention to the meanings that people contract through
communication, what we see and know about our environment is actually constructed by
our communication instead of from direct observation.
• Critical approach: What should communication look like? In the critical theory you
should really look at how communication can
contribute to a society that is for example open or
egalitarian.
Two theories about how an organization relates to
the different parties in the environment.
• The stakeholder theory says that besides
investors, customers, employees and suppliers
there are other parties involved such as,
governments, communities and political groups.
The relations are two ways.
• The issue management/arena model says that
there are a lot of parties interested and involved
in a topic. You have to fight or invest to defend
your position or to have a say.
The stakeholder salience model is looking at how much power, legitimacy and urgency a
stakeholder has. This model separates seven kinds of stakeholders. Dormant, dominant,
discretionary, definitive, dangerous, dependent, demanding stakeholder.
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, The power-interest matrix aims to categorize
stakeholders on the basis of the power they pos-
sess and the extent to which they are likely to have,
or show, an interest in the organization’s activities.
The stakeholder communication goes through
different strategies that can be seen in the figure
below. Informational strategy is a strategy of informing someone about something. A
persuasive strategy tries to change and tune the knowledge, attitude and behavior of
stakeholders. Or a dialogue strategy in which both parties (organizations and stakehold-
ers) mutually engage in an exchange of ideas and opinions. The strategies differ in
involving or engaging the stakeholders.
Corporate communication - week 2
Identity, culture and reputation
What organizations show of themselves is their identity. They try to influence their
reputation, what people think of them. They come up with a vision, and describe how
they will try to complete this in their mission. They also express their identity in a visual
design, the corporate visual identity. This image has several advantages:
distinctiveness, impact and more stakeholders. To convey your corporate
personality/identity you use the attributes: behavior, communication and symbolism. If you
keep doing this in a consistent way, people are going to pick that up and it will be reflected
in your corporate image. Corporate identity is the
identity that the organization is revealing to the outside
world. Organizational identity are the shared values of
the people who work inside the organization.
There are two different approaches to identity. The static
approach (left) sees it as what is central, distinctive and
enduring. The dynamic approach sees identity as what
organizational members belief is central, distinctive and
enduring.
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