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Marketing, Public Relations and Corporate Communications 45

and product publicity was an obvious path for many organizations.Such a realignment
of communications, basically consisting of bringing various communications
disciplines together into departments or specific working practices, also proved
productive in that it offered new organizational and managerial benefits that were
non-existent before. For one, the consolidation of communications activities, besides
leading to new interactions and complementary relationships between various com-
munications disciplines, enabled organizations to provide strategic direction to their
communications and to guide communications efforts from the strategic interests of
the organization as a whole. In other words, organizations increasingly started to
recognize that the fragmentation and spreading out of the communications responsi-
bilities across the organization, which had characterized many organizations in the
past, proved counterproductive. Such fragmentation, as Anders Gronstedt points out,
is likely to lead to a situation where ‘each department sub-optimizes its own perfor-
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mance, instead of working for the organization as a whole’. Many organizations, as
Chapter 5 outlines in more detail, have therefore since developed innovative proce-
dures (e.g. communication guidelines, house style manuals) and implemented coordi-
nation mechanisms (e.g. council meetings, networking platforms) to overcome
fragmentation and integrate their communications on an organization-wide scale.
The ‘corporate’ perspective upon communications management, which involves
looking at all communications in a holistic manner and linking the communications
strategy to the corporate strategy (and thus to overall corporate objectives), was often
also taken as organizations realized that investing in their corporate profile or corporate
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identity instead of their product brands alone is of great value. With brand choices
expanding and product homogeneity increasing, consumers were seeking out the
company behind the brand even more as an extra point of difference and reassur-
ance.This marked an extension from a customer-to-brand bond to an additional cus-
tomer- to-company bond. The corporate identity thus often became a filter for
overwhelming product multiplicity and a critical difference in a ‘sea of sameness’ for
consumers. But investing in corporate identity, and in the profiling of the organiza-
tion as a whole, delivers more benefits for the organization than customer prefer-
ences alone, as a strong and well-crafted identity also leads to members of the
community appreciating the organization in its environs, investors granting financial
resources, (prospective) employees wanting to work for the organization, and so on.

Communications-based drivers
In contemporary market environments, in which it is increasingly difficult to be
heard and stand out from one’s competitors, organizations are, as already mentioned,
well served by integrated communications strategies.Through consistent messages, and
by having all communications ‘sing from the same hymn sheet’, an organization is
more likely to be known and looked upon favourably by key audiences.This means
that considerable effort needs to be put into choosing the corporate profile and/or
product brand profile(s) that an organization wants to communicate to its key stake-
holders, followed by a consideration of all communications campaigns and other
contact points with stakeholders that need to be managed in order to achieve this in
a consistent manner.