Hoofdstuk 1: Defining Corporate Communication
There is a big belief that the future of any company depends on how its viewed by key stakeholders
such as shareholders and investors, customers and consumers, employees, and members of the
community in which the company operates.
CEOs and senior executives of many large organizations and multinationals consider protecting their
company’s reputation to be critical and as one of their most important strategic objectives.
The task of building, maintaining and protecting the company’s reputation is the core task of corporate
communication.
An understanding between communication practitioners and senior managers is essential for an
effective use of corporate communication and its also empowering.
Until the 1970s practitioners used the term ‘public relations’ to describe communication with
stakeholders. This largely consisted of communication with the press.
When other stakeholders demanded more information from companies, practitioners started to look at
communications as more than just ‘public relations’, this is when the roots of the new corporate
communication function started to begin.
This new function included a lot of specialized disciplines, like corporate design, corporate advertising,
internal communication to employees, issues and crisis management, media relations, investor
relations, change communication and public affairs.
An important characteristic of the new function is that it focuses on the organization as a whole and on
the important task of how an organization presents itself to all its key stakeholders both internal and
external.
The word ‘corporate’ refers to the business setting in which corporate communication emerged as a
separate function. The word also originally comes from the Latin words for ‘body’, which emphasize a
unified wat of looking at internal and external communication disciplines.
Corporate communication can be characterized as a management function that is responsible for
overseeing and coordinating the work done by communication practitioners in different specialist
disciplines.
Van Riel defines corporate communication as ‘an instrument of management by means of which all
consciously used forms of internal and external communication are harmonized as effectively and
efficiently as possible’, with the overall objective of creating ‘a favorable basis for relationships with
groups upon which the company is dependent’.
Defined in this way, corporate communication involves a whole range of ‘managerial’ activities such as
planning, coordinating and counselling, as well as the ‘tactical’ skills involved in producing and
disseminating content and messages to relevant stakeholders.
,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.
One consequence of these characteristics of corporate communication is that it is likely to be complex in
nature. This is especially so in organizations with a wide geographical range, where the coordination of
communication is often a balancing act between corporate headquarters and the various divisions and
business units involved.
Corporate communication demands an integrated approach to managing communication. It transcends
the specialties of individual communication practitioners and crosses these specialist boundaries to
harness the strategic interest of the organization at large.
Richard Edelman highlights the strategic role of corporate communication as: ‘We used to be the tail of
the dog, but now communication is the organizing principle behind many business decisions.’
The general idea is that the sustainability and success of a company depends on how it is viewed by key
stakeholders, and communication is a critical part of building, maintaining and protecting such
reputations.
Key concepts that form the vocabulary of the corporate communication practitioner:
Mission: overriding purpose in line with the values and expectations of stakeholders.
Vision: desired future state; the aspiration of the organization.
Corporate objectives: statement of overall aims in line with the overall purpose.
Strategy: the way or means in which the corporate objectives are to be achieved and put into effect.
Corporate identity: the profile and values communicated by any organization.
Corporate image: the immediate set of associations of an individual in response to one or more signals
or messages from or about a particular organization at a single point in time.
Corporate reputation: an individual’s collective representation of past images of an organization
(induced through either communication or past experiences) established over time.
Stakeholder: any group or individual who can affect or is affected by the achievement of the
organization’s objective.
Market: a defined group for whom a product is or may be in demand (and for whom an organization
creates and maintains products and services).
Communication: the tactics and media that are used to communicate with internal and external groups.
Integration: the act of coordinating all communication so that the corporate identity is effectively and
consistently communicated to internal end external groups.
The difference between corporate communication and business and management communication is
that corporate focuses on the organization as a whole while business and management are more
technical and applied and their focus is restricted to interpersonal situations.
Business tends to focus almost exclusively on skills, especially writing, and looks towards the individual
manager or professional, while corporate focuses on the entire company and the entire fuction of
management.
,Corporate communication is typically taught and researched in business schools, its also taught in
communication and journalism schools. Researchers say that its good that people from more fields look
at corporate communication, like communication, science, psychology, and the broader humanities.
In the 1980s there was a powerful restructuring trend in many corporate organizations where separate
communication disciplines were brought together into more integrated departments or into specific
working practices. Companies recognized that the previous fragmentation of communication in terms of
separate disciplines had often proved counterproductive.
Another realization was that communication generally had to be used more strategically to position the
organization in the minds of important stakeholders. Since the early 1990s and until the early 2000s,
organizations became primarily concerned with ideas such as corporate identity, corporate reputation
and corporate branding, which emphasize the importance of this position.
The assumption is that corporate communicators can strategically plan and design their messaging in
order to take up a reputational position in the minds of stakeholders. So it suggests a linear, or what’s
also called a conduit, model of communication, as opposed to seeing communication as a joint activity.
Stakeholders have become much more active in voicing their expectations towards organizations and
have also started to expect more interactive and dialogue-based forms of communication. This has led
to people claiming that the old models of corporate communication are ‘dead’, and that we’re seeing a
change towards interactive models of communication.
So for example, replacing the traditional one-way structure of corporate communication with a
dynamic process in which leaders talk with employees and not just to them.
Social media makes this easier, but it is still too early to claim that there’s an actual shift going on. The
growing number of social media offers challenges but also opportunities to organizations in terms of
word-of-mouth and peer-to-peer influence when individuals self-organize and may become advocates
for the organization.
When individuals hold an organization in esteem, value its reputation and decide to buy from, work for,
invest in or otherwise decide in favor of that organization, they are more likely to become genuine
advocates and supporters.
, The current state of corporate communication is one of gradual change, where there is change in terms
of how organizations communicate with stakeholders but also continuity in that the old principles of
strategic messaging and reputation management still apply.
The difference lies in the dismissal of the view that stakeholders can be managed and controlled in their
views. Another difference lies in the principle that organizations need to engage individual stakeholders
through different platforms, in addition to addressing broader audiences, publics or stakeholders.\
The focus with engagement is not on shaping opinions or perceptions, bur on the organization being
transparent and acting in character in order to bring across its distinctive identity and in a way that
fosters individuals to become genuine advocates and act in their favor.
