Page 11 - Corporate Communication

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2 Preface

1. What is corporate communications, and how can it be defined?
2. What strategies and activities are central to this profession?
3. What is the organizational location, status and role of this profession?

In addressing these questions, the book is written to deliver a number of benefits.
The reader will learn the following:

• The nature of the corporate communications profession, its historical emergence
and its role in contemporary corporations.
• The critical role of the corporate communications function in building and
maintaining relationships with the stakeholders of a corporation.
• The key issues – corporate social responsibility, reputation management, corpo-
rate identity, integrated communications – that dominate this profession, and how
to deal with them.
• Different approaches to develop corporate communications strategies and to
implement communications programmes.
• Different approaches to measure and monitor the impact of communications
upon the images and reputations that stakeholders have of a corporation.
• Different ways of organizing communications practitioners within a corporation
and of maximizing their performance.

Approach of the book

In writing this book, the objective was to satisfy three key criteria by which any
management text can be judged:

1. Depth: the material in the book needed to be presented in a comprehensive and
thorough manner, and needed to be well grounded in the academic and practi-
tioner literature and knowledge base.
2. Breadth: the book had to cover all those topics that define the field of corporate
communications and that practising managers and students of corporate com-
munications management find interesting or important.
3. Relevance: the book had to be well grounded in practice and easily related to past
and present communications activities, events and case studies.

Although a number of books have been written on corporate communications in
recent years, no book has really maximized these three dimensions to the greatest
possible extent.Accordingly, this book sets out to fill that gap by accomplishing three
things. First, instead of being solely based on practitioner anecdotes (that rashly lead
into sound-bite steps to communication success) or simple and normative frame-
works that have been developed in recent years, the book provides a more informed
and evidence-based account of the corporate communications profession by includ-
ing insights from academic research. Second, all the contemporary and important
themes and topics within the remit of the corporate communications function
including ‘corporate social responsibility’ and ‘stakeholder management’ are discussed
in detail. Particular attention is paid to the central topics of the structuring of the