Page 110 - Corporate Communication

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Communications Strategy 99

primarily with the technical gathering of information and with carrying out publicity
and promotion campaigns to external audiences.
Seeing corporate communications as a strategic function, in contrast, requires
the strategic involvement of communications practitioners in managerial decision
making. Such a strategic view of communications, which in part has already been
realized within the business world but in part is also still aspirational, means that
communications strategy is not just seen as a set of goals and tactics at the functional
level – at the level of the communications function – but that its scope and involve-
ment in fact stretches to the corporate and business unit levels as well.At the corpo-
rate level, where strategy is concerned with the corporate mission and vision as well
as corporate positioning through the corporate identity mix, communications prac-
titioners can aid managers in developing strategies for interaction with the environ-
ment. In this sense, communications practitioners are directly involved or support
strategic decision making through their ‘environmental scanning’ activities, which
may assist corporate strategy-makers in analysing the organization’s position and
identifying emerging issues that may have significant implications for the organiza-
tion and for future strategy development. Communications practitioners can at this
corporate level also bring identity questions and a stakeholder perspective into the
strategic management process, representing the likely reaction of stakeholders to
alternative strategy options, and thereby giving senior management a more balanced
consideration of the attractiveness and feasibility of the strategic options open to
them. Lastly, communications practitioners of course may also implement the cor-
porate strategy by helping to communicate the organization’s strategic intentions to
both internal and external stakeholders, which may help avoid misunderstandings
that might otherwise get in the way of the smooth implementation of the organiza-
tion’s strategy. With such intricate involvement in the corporate and business unit
levels, corporate communications strategy is also more substantial – in being linked
to the corporate vision and objectives – instead of being just a tactical ploy, and can
be neatly built around the analysis of stakeholder relationships and key issues that are
identified at the corporate and business unit or market levels and which form the
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basis for formulating specific communications programmes. In other words, in an era
of stakeholder management, corporate communications strategy cannot be divorced
from the organization’s corporate and business unit strategies, to which it must con-
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tribute if it is to have a genuine strategic role. As one practitioner put it, commu-
nications ‘must pass one basic test: at minimum; everything done must be aligned
with the corporate vision or mission … and must substantially contribute to achieving
the organization’s objectives’. 13
This nested model of strategy and strategy formation, in which corporate, busi-
ness unit and functional communications strategies are seen as interrelated layers in
the total strategy-making structure of the organization, depends on a number of condi-
tions. First of all, a conventional view of strategy formation where strategy is seen to
cascade down from the corporate to the business unit and ultimately to the func-
tional level, with each level of strategy providing the immediate context for the next,
‘lower’ level of strategy making, needs to be aborted.As scholars such as Mintzberg
and Whittington 14 have suggested, strategy making fares better when it does not
strictly follow such a rigid, hierarchical top-down process, but when it is more
flexible and at least in part decentralized, so that business units or functional teams are