Corporate Communications & Branding

Notes for introductory Topic 1

INTRODUCTION TO CORPORATE COMMUNCATION

How a company is viewed by its key stakeholders is critically important and is treated as a strategic
corporate initiative by CEO’s of large organizations.

• The building, maintenance and protection of this reputation is therefore the core task of corporate
communication practitioners.

• However, many CEO’s fail to see the strategic value of CC (Corporate Communication) due to its lack
of tangibility and traceability.

• Positive engagement with Stakeholders is prickly issue and one that has repeatedly caused friction due
the lack of process to see a return on investment in such initiatives.

SCOPE AND DEFINTIONS

Until the 1970’s practitioners had used the term ‘public relations’ which essentially meant
communication with the press. As the demand for clear communication grew from internal and external
stakeholders, corporate communication slowly grew to take hold as a ‘bona fide’ business practice. A
whole range of specialized disciplines including, corporate design, advertising, internal communication
to employees, issues and crisis management, , media and investor relations, change communication,
public affairs.

• The key difference being that it focuses on the organization as a whole and how it presents itself to its
key stakeholders.

• Corporate Communication is therefore a management function that oversees the work done by
communication practitioners in different specialist disciplines such as media relations, public
affairs, internal communication. ‘..an instrument of management by means of which all
consciously used forms of internal and external communication are harmonized as effectively
and as efficiently as possible.’ Van Riel.

• The overall objective is seen as that of creating a favorable basis for relationships with groups upon
which the company is dependent.

• Complexity - The larger the corporation the more complex the task of corporate communication, here
the objective is to harness the strategic interests of the organization at large.‘We used to be the
tail on the dog, but now we are the organizing principle behind many business decisions’.
Edelman.

KEY CONCEPTS OF CORPORATE COMMUNCATION (see also the supplementary slides for
examples)

• Mission- Overriding purpose in line with the values and expectations of stakeholders.

• Vision - Desired future State. The aspiration of the organization.

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• Corp Objectives - Statement of overall aims in line with overall purpose.

• Strategy- The ways or means in which the corporate objectives are to be achieved and put into effect.

• Corp I.D.- The profile and values communicated by an organization.

• Corp Image- Set of associations of an individual in response to one or more signals or messages about
a particular organization at a single point in time.

• Corp reputation- An individual’s collective representation of past images of an organization,

• Stakeholder- Any group or individual who can affect or is affected by the achievement of the
organization’s objectives.

• Market- A defined group for who a product is or may be in demand.

• 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 and external groups.

TRENDS IN CORPORATE COMMUNICATION

Powerful restructuring trend in corporations during the 1980’s, where every function in the organization
was assessed based on its accountability and contribution to the organization. However this led to
communication disciplines such as media relations, advertising, product publicity for example being
treated specifically. Whilst this was initially productive, it proved counterproductive as it led to
fragmentation and sub-optimization as each dept optimized its own performance rather than working for
the organization as a whole. Another key driver for integrating communication at the organizational
level was the realization that communication had to be used more strategically to ‘position’ the
organization in the minds of important stakeholder groups.

Corporate ID, Corporate Branding and Reputation became the primary focus. The key downside to this
was that it reinforced an assumption that the minds of stakeholders can be managed, controlled and
manipulated. This one-way communication of ‘conduit’ communication negates viewing communication
as a joint activity.

The good news here is that the advent of the internet and social media has shifted the argument firmly to
the stakeholder who proactively and in an empowered manner, makes demands on the corporation in
favor of the stakeholder (society).

This has led to industries proclaiming that the old models of corporate communication are dead. Social
media vs. Broadcast media. There is a gradual change, in that individual stakeholders can share opinions,
experiences and ideas about corporations and organize for action, at scale. New media tech is the
enabling factor in this process. This situation offers challenges but also opportunities to organizations in
terms of word-of-mouth and peer to peer influence when individuals self-organize and become advocates
for the organization.

Whilst the mechanics might have changed, the overriding principle is the same, that is, when individuals
hold an organization in esteem, value its reputation and decide to buy from, work for, invest in or
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otherwise decide in favor of that organization, they are more likely to become genuine advocates and
supporters.

Old rules of strategic messaging and reputation management still apply. A break with this model
suggests organizations need to engage individual stakeholders, the focus on organizational transparency
is key.

Corporate Communication in Contemporary Organizations

The changing definition and scope and organization of the professional discipline. The societal and
Market dynamics that have shaped the evolution of this communication. Marketing and Public relations,
how these disciplines have integrated to become a communication strategy with stakeholders.

Integrated Communication

Organizations realized that in order to prosper they needed to concern themselves with issues of public
concern (public relations) as well as successfully bringing products to market (Marketing) These two
areas, once very isolated have come into the new management function of corporate communication.

Kotler: Need to develop a new paradigm where these two subcultures work effectively in the interest of
the organization and the public it serves. The merging of marketing and public relations into one external
function.

Kotler Mindak Model

The idea of these 2 functions as separate disciplines was absurd and it was widely recognized that these
functions shared common ground. Companies were already looking for alternatives to ever more
expensive mass media advertising and ways to build brand awareness.

Companies have started to make use of MPR (Marketing Public Relations) the use of PR techniques for
marketing purposes, found to be a cost effective tool for generating awareness and brand favorability and
to imbue communication.

Model (c) involves a view of marketing as the dominant function, PR just becomes part of a wider
marketing function for satisfying customers, an example of this perspective involves the notion of
integrated marketing communications (IMC) which recognizes the added value of a comprehensive plan
that evaluates the strategic role of a variety of disciplines (advertising, direct marketing, sales promotions
and PR) and combines these disciplines to provide clarity, consistency and maximum communication
impact. Within IMC, PR is reduced to activities of product publicity and sponsorship, ignoring its wider
remit in communicating to employees, investors, communities, the media and government.

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Model (d) suggests the alternative where marketing should be under PR, to make sure that the goodwill
of all key publics is maintained, in this model, marketing’s role of satisfying customers is seen as only
part of a wider PR effort. An example here is Strategic PR, which assumes all communication programs
should be coordinated by a public relations department, including IMC, advertising and marketing public
relations.

Model (e) views the functions as merged into one ‘external communication’ function. Under the above
model, the two might be merged under a VP of Marketing and PR who is charge of planning and
managing the external affairs of the company. Despite the authors preference for this model, it’s not a
form of integration that is common within organizations. Firms often still want to keep these functions
separate but then actively coordinate PR and marketing communication programs, in other words, most
organizations practice model (b) however model (e) seems to be becoming more popular.

2010’s saw the emergence of ‘branded content’ this drove a further wedge between marketing and public
relations. The generation of content for a corporation or a brand in the form of a press release, an opinion
article, a keynote or a video has always been a part of public relations, social media has sent this need
into hyperspace making ‘content generation’ a clear marketing prerogative.

‘Branded content’ is a bit of both, it’s the generation of content on an online marketing platform that
features both product related content as well as general interest content that speaks favorably to the
corporation or brand in question.

LEGO is a good example, with it’s YouTube channel which involves content that features LEGO, but
it’s mainly focused on engaging children in playing an building, rather than advertising its products in a
direct manner to parents. Because of the quality content, the channel receives more than 1bn visits every
month! Another example of branded content is L’Oréal’s ownership of the popular website,
www.makeup.com.

MPR and ‘branded content’ use PR techniques but are directly focused on the marketing of a company’s
products, as such, these forms of communication are distinct from corporate activities within PR. These
corporate activities, sometimes labeled Corporate Public Relations CPR, involve communication with
investors, communities, employees, the media and govt.

Marketing and PR complement each other, e.g. A company’s image created through PR programs can
positively reflect on its product brands, increasing both brand awareness and brand perception. Also the
‘guardian role of PR’ as a watchdog or corrective for marketing in bringing in other viewpoints and
expectations of other stakeholders besides customers with regard to strategic decision making. This
overlap and complementarity between marketing and PR, suggested to companies that its useful to align
both disciplines or at least manage them in an integrated manner.

Drivers for Integrated Communication

Market and Environment Based Drivers

Demands of different stakeholders, customers, investors, employees, activist groups have forced
organizations to integrate their efforts for marketing and PR, any one individual can have multiple
stakeholder roles, customer, employee, shareholder, member of the local community and problems can
occur when conflicting messages are sent out. Technology has also sped up the delivery of the comms,
everyone has a smartphone, and many have a Twitter a/c. Also firms are facing pressure to be more
transparent in their ops.

Communication Based Drivers

In today’s environment it’s much more difficult to stand out from your rivals, media and comms experts

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estimate that an individual is hit by 13,000 commercial messages per day. Integrated Comm strategies
are more likely to break thru the clutter than an ill-coordinated attempt. Through consistent messages, an
org is more likely to be remembered by key stakeholders. Therefore alignment and organization among
strategies is key to success. Comms across different medias can complement each other, leading to a
greater impact than any one single message can achieve. Social media is key.

Organizational Drivers

The need to become more efficient. Using the same comm materials over different campaigns,
organizations can improve the productivity of their comms. There is an economic rationale behind
consolidating disciplines into single departments.

Greater integration increases accountability of the communication function. Also, with easier
coordination across the different communications practitioners and disciplines, it is easier to provide
strategic direction to all of their comms with different stakeholder groups.

The Organization of External Communication.

Corporate communication is a management framework to guide and coordinate marketing and public
relations.

Many organizations are now experimenting with Agile teams, (Horizontal structure, i.e. not
hierarchical, therefore do not appear in the organizational chart) inspired by Spotify, where
communication professionals and professionals from other functions are flexibly grouped and regrouped
into natural work teams, tasked with solving specific issues.

Case 2.1 (Siemens CC org. chart) illustrates how communication is organized at Siemens, it shows the
choices that were made in horizontal and vertical structuring of communications and how these relate to
changes in the corporation’s strategy, the company’s culture and geographical complexity of its ops.
Here we have seen the historical development of communication in organizations and the factors that
triggered the emergence of corporate communication.

Corp Comm. has brought a more strategic and integrated perspective on managing communication for
the benefit of the entire organization, many corporate organizations have consolidated their
communication activities into a single department with ready access to the executive decision-making
team.

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Corporate Communication in a Changing Media Environment.

Recent years have seen an explosion of opportunities and use of new media in society, such as Facebook,
YouTube and other web 2.0 apps such as blogs and wikis. Challenges and opportunities to engage with
their stakeholders. Highlights the democratization of the productions and dissemination of news on
organizations, enabled by web based tech.

Employees can distribute their own information about an organization with no gatekeeping. Due the
number of access points, email, blogs, twitter, FB etc., many employees become corporate
communicators themselves. Blurred boundaries between content providers and consumers, gathering and
dissemination increasingly fragmented, this challenges the dissemination of a corporate message and
subsequently how the company is seen and understood.

However, that which is a challenge can also be an opportunity, as these vehicles offer news ways to
access stakeholders in an interactive manner. A real advance compared to the arm’s-length messaging
model employed associated with more traditional channels. Companies can speak in an authentic voice,
engage stakeholders in an interactive manner and empower them to become true advocates of the
organization.

The New Media Landscape.

The new media landscape is a game changer for corporate communication, social media and web 2.0
tech foster interactive and free flowing conversations, for example between corp comm practitioners and
stakeholders. This marks a clear break from traditional message flows.

The simultaneous challenge and opportunities are tied into the democratizing nature of these media, as
they (these media) are less about control and more about proactive engagement with digital and web
based conversations and communities.

These internet applications have enabled the sharing of information amongst users who are now
individual information providers. Providing information to stakeholders ins decreasing whereas user-
generated information is shared amongst other internet users. The previous growth in the amount of
information has been replaced by the growth in the communication of that information.

Driving a shift with how people engage with one another in organizations, this changes how dialogues
occur, how news is generated and disseminated. Traditional news media has taken a hit, newspapers on
the decline, users flock to alternative news sources. Corporate Communication will have to reinvent as
these new media evolve.

Social Media or Web 2.0? Social media, this term arrived with the advent of platforms such as FB in
2004 etc. defined as involving all kinds of digital tech through which people create, share and exchange
info and ideas.

Web 2.0 on the other hand describes a general ideological and technological shift in the use of on line
tech. The shift is the following, the creation and publication of websites by individuals or corporations is
Web 1.0 whereas blogs/vlogs wikis and collaborative projects are hallmarks of web 2.0, where content
and applications are continuously generated and modified by all users in a participatory and collaborative
manner. We shall talk of social media to include Web 2.0.

Distinguishing the different media types:

Traditional media – one way message techniques through which organizations speak to an audience via
broadcasting, trying to persuade many stakeholders at once. Thus stakeholders are audiences.

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Social media on the other hand could be characterized as ‘crowd casting’ as they enable stakeholders to
self-organize in order to produce and disseminate content about an organization.

A seed may first be planted by an organization within a community, with the community on its own,
generating discussion and forming perspectives and solutions on the issue.

There may be ‘push and pull’ elements whereby the organization first engages a community of
stakeholders (push) and then harnesses the network for insight (pull). In many cases however, it is self-
initiating and may only have limited ties to the organization, all people need is the available time to do
so. This shift implies a fundamental change in thinking for corporate communicators about how they
approach their stakeholders and communicate with them.

Traditional practices demand releasing messages in a timed and controlled manner to build manage and
maintain a strong reputational position in the minds of their stakeholder groups. This positioning model
is one where practitioners start with their own objectives and assume that through powerful PR
campaigns the company’s reputation can be strengthened or maintained.

This principle no longer works in a social media environment, here a shift is necessary, from the
controlled and planned (corporate positioning) release of corporate messages to the community wide
generation of content.

Content generation defines corporate communication as a joint activity between an organization and its
stakeholders where the latter can just as easily initiate a conversation as the organization can. As a result
the process of communication changes from carefully crafted messages in a scripted manner to one that’s
much more messy and open ended.

#McDStories example.

This social media presence is now divided into owned, earned or paid categories. This highlights how
companies have become their own content generators (owned) company web, blog with branded content,
partially owned, the FB, LinkedIn YouTube (Lego YouTube e.g.) Paid and Earned media then refer to
channels through which companies try to spread the word on their company and its products or services.

Paid media refers to paid for Ads, links or banners on other social media channels meant to drive traffic
to owned properties. This may be simply Google Ads, or paying bloggers/Vloggers/influencers to refer
to a website. See makeup.com.

Earned media, then, is online generated word of mouth about an organization, often manifesting itself in
viral tendencies, mentions, shares, reposts, reviews, recommendations and other content picked up by
third-party sites.

See table on slide 22

Earned media has traditionally been the mandate of the public relations professionals, while paid and
owned media were part of marketing. This split reflected the distinction between PR and Marketing.
However practitioners have grown closer and started working to recognize the importance of integrating
their work and leveraging brand or organizational content across platforms. One emerging pattern is to
have all 3 media platforms consistently sharing posts with one another, generating coherency and
consistency between content creators.

Spotify Case.

Classifying Social Media

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The degree to which the media facilitates individual involvement and allows for rich forms of interaction
when individuals and organizations use such media. A defining characteristic of social media is that is it
imitates face-to-face contact and have almost comparable levels of richness, traditional broadcasting
media is poor in this respect.

Media richness, media differ in their degree of richness (the amount of info and cues that can be
exchanged between individuals in real time) e.g. WhatsApp. Poor media (written docs or a corporate
advert, information can only be proactively retrieved by the target party.

Intentions and Objectives of users in social media, creation of a self-image in line with personal identity,
this comes with a degree of self-disclosure, release of personal info, tastes, likes dislikes etc. This is
crucial as it allows individuals to build relationships.

Blogs – Enables people to publish in diary, journal style bloggers control information they publish and
moderate, review comments from viewers. 175,000 new blogs created per day. This suggests the need to
engage with influential bloggers. Twitter – microblogging however more interactive than traditional
blogging.

Collaborative Projects – wikis, where users add change and update text based content, collective
wisdom leads to an updating and correction of contents.

Social networking sites – allow users to present personal information and create profiles of themselves,
this leads to the formation of a network or community who exchange instant messages with each other.
Some companies use these as direct marketing and distribution channels, FB, LinkedIn, the challenge is
for companies to have a discreet presence on these platforms that reinforces the personal image of the
company and its brands and is less about selling.

Content Communities – e.g. YouTube, Slideshare, Flikr. Risk of divulgence of copyrighted material.
YouTube particularly powerful, creating own channel for presenting corporate videos and recruitment
activities. BP’s energy lab, ‘tips to living greener’

Virtual Social Worlds – Such as Second life https://secondlife.com/ replicates human interaction via
avatars and supports ways in which individuals present themselves, has been adopted by corporations,
Toyota, Cisco IBM, EBay, Verizon, recruitment fairs to tech savvy recruits. Not a primary means for
engaging with stakeholders.

Virtual Game Worlds – World of Warcraft. Users, (avatars) are restricted in how they behave, mostly
on-line role playing game. Very limited corporate applications, except maybe advertising.

Risks to corporations are generally brought about by the immediacy of the medium. The personal views
of an individual can cascade and become majority opinion in no time at all (trending). Opportunity is
equally immediate and can be harnessed by the proactive company, e.g., BP’s Energy Arena.