Page 111 - Corporate Communication

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100 Corporate Communications in Practice

1. Defining communications/
campaign objectives

What’s happening now?
(situation analysis)

What should we
4. Evaluating How did we do? communicate, and why? 2. Planning
the campaign (evaluation) the campaign
(message/creative strategy)

How and when do we say it?
(implementation/media plan)

3. Taking action and
communicating
Figure 4.1 A traditional process of developing communications campaigns

encouraged to initiate ideas that are then passed upward for approval at the appropriate
senior management level. From such a perspective, business units and functional
management teams may be responsible not only for developing strategic responses to
the problems or opportunities encountered at their own level, but may sometimes
initiate ideas that then become the catalyst for changes in strategy throughout the
organization. Communications practitioners, for instance, may relay their under-
standing and mapping of stakeholder relationships at the functional level to the senior
management level and may as such initiate a revision of corporate strategy in terms
of how the organization needs to build and maintain relationships with those organi-
zational stakeholders who may have the power to influence the successful realization
of its goals.
The layers between the corporate, business unit and corporate communications
levels thus need to be permeable and relaxed, allowing decentralized initiatives and
input from the lower level corporate communications function to the higher senior
management echelon. For this to happen communications practitioners need to
meet management expectations in terms of understanding and responding to the
needs and concerns of the corporation or its separate business units – i.e. in terms of
demonstrating how corporate communications can contribute to the bottom-line or
provide invaluable counsel on the organization’s environment. A different view of
communications, and what it can do, follows from this. Instead of seeing communi-
cations ‘strategy’ as campaign planning or a set of programmed tactics, as has often
15
been the case in the past (see Figure 4.1 above), communications becomes a strate-
gic management function that is charged with counselling senior management, and
guiding and managing the reputations and relationships with important stakeholder
groups that may impact upon the organization’s operations. An illustration of this
view of corporate communications – as a critical management function and as linked
to corporate strategy – is provided in Box 4.1.