Page 53 - Corporate Communication

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42 Mapping the Field

Table 2.3 Drivers for integration
Market and environment-based drivers
Stakeholder roles – needs and overlap
Societal and market demands
Increased competition – need for differentiation
Greater levels of audience communications literacy
Greater amounts of message clutter
Media and audience fragmentation
Organizational drivers
Improved efficiency (increasing profits)
Increased accountability
Provision of strategic direction and purpose through consolidation
Corporate/organizational positioning
Streamlining of activities in complex organizations (global, multinational and/or multidivisional
businesses)
Communication-based drivers
Increased message effectiveness through consistency and reinforcement of core messages
Need to build corporate and/or brand reputations and to provide clear identity cues
Complementarity of communications techniques and media cost inflation
Media multiplication requires control of communication channels

A managerial framework is thus needed, Gronstedt suggests, that ‘inserts the various
communications disciplines into a holistic perspective, drawing from the concepts,
methodologies, crafts, experiences, and artistries of marketing communications and
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public relations’. This need for some form of integration has now been widely
accepted by many communications practitioners across the globe, and the corporate
communications concept has, as will be shown below, made considerable inroads
since the 1990s as a result. Organizations, it seems, are now increasingly working
from the framework of corporate communications, but what were the conditions
and factors that triggered it? In other words, it is important that, before the chapter
defines some of the key changes that corporate communications has brought to
the practice of communications management,the factors that lie behind the need for
integration in communications management and the adoption of corporate commu-
nications as a management function are revisited.
The explosion of interest in integration, and the emergence of corporate com-
munications in its slipstream, has resulted from a variety of factors or ‘drivers’ as these
can be more aptly called. Generally, these drivers can be grouped into three main
categories:those drivers that are market and environment based,those that arise from
the communications mix and communication technologies, and those that are
driven by opportunities, changes and needs from within the organization itself. All
of these drivers are set out in Table 2.3.

Market and environment-based drivers
The environment in which organizations operate has changed considerably over the
past two decades. Not only has the environment become more complex for many