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Communications Strategy 103

The process of strategy making that is outlined in this section meets this concern.
The process describes how communications strategies are built from the corporate
level and are not just seen as functional level strategies or campaign tactics used to
implement and effectuate decisions made at a more senior level. Communications
issues and stakeholder groups become themselves identified at the corporate level in
relation to corporate objectives and business operations; and corporate communica-
tions strategies are subsequently developed for addressing them.
Another characteristic of the strategy process described below is that it recognizes
that the process of strategy formation may be conducted predominantly through
a combination of planning approaches and emergent behaviour and activities.In other
words, strategy making is outlined below as a stage-by-stage and planned process of
working from analysis and objectives to programmes and evaluation, which may
seem rather linear and prescriptive. But it is recognized that in practice this process
is rather more flexible, cyclical and iterative, allowing for strategy makers to cycle
backwards and forwards through the various elements of the programme (to ensure
the feasibility and consistency of the developed strategy), as well as for strategic
behaviour and actions to simply emerge in response to issues, crises or other envi-
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ronmental opportunities. The process of communications strategy that is outlined
below may therefore best be seen as a route map that guides senior managers as well
as communications staff (public relations, marketing, etc.) in their work.

Developing communications strategy

It is important to stress that the model presented in this book is a useful device or
means by which managers and students of corporate communications can think
through strategic issues and explore the domain of communications strategy – it is
not, to be fair, an exact empirical description of how the process of strategy making
in communications necessarily takes place within each and every organization. Put
differently, and as mentioned above, communications strategy in many organizations
does not always involve a logical sequence of steps in which strategies are the out-
come of careful analysis, objective setting and planning. Although many organiza-
tions, it needs to be said, do have formal planning systems and find that they
contribute usefully to the development of the strategy of their organizations, others
do not. Managers in such organizations may still think about the strategic position
of their organization, or the choices it faces, but may then do so through a process
of crafting instead of in a highly formalized way. Here strategy making is seen not as
a formal planning process, but rather in terms of processes by which strategies
develop in organizations on the basis of managers’ experience, their sensitivity to
changes in their environments and what they have learned from the past. Nonetheless,
even though some organizations are thus characterized by such a crafting approach
to strategy, the model outlined below still gives them some reference points for
thinking through the process of developing communications strategy.
The whole process or cycle of strategy making in communications can be divided
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into four phases – strategic analysis, strategic intent, strategic action and evaluation –
with each of these phases incorporating a number of activities.The process is graphi-
cally depicted in Figure 4.2 with the communications strategy model. Each of the