Page 57 - Corporate Communication

Cornelissen-02.qxd 10/9/2004 9:04 AM Page 46

46 Mapping the Field

The insight that messages in various media can complement one another, leading to a
greater communications impact than any one single message can achieve, also made
organizations look upon their media choices in a much broader sense. Particularly
with advertising increasingly being under fire, as according to some commentators it
had far too long been ‘highly visible in its appearance and highly invisible in its
effects’, 29 and with the explosion of media options available, many organizations
re-examined their media presence and how to control it.In the light of these media devel-
opments, many industry commentators, practitioners and academics have argued that
organizations and practitioners should now move away from rigid classifications of
media in ‘above-the-line’ advertising and ‘below-the-line’ promotions or publicity,
and towards a notion of through-the-line or zero-based communications, where rather
than pre-fixed choices for particular communications media, the most appropriate
medium given a particular communications objective is chosen. 30
Taken together, these drivers explain the preoccupation with integration in
communications management that has characterized the latter two decades of the
twentieth century and that is still with us through the adoption and entrenchment
of corporate communications as the guiding framework for how communications is
managed today. From the historical sketch that has been presented in this chapter,
the following section outlines the key changes that the corporate communications
philosophy has already brought to the practice of communications management.

2.4 Corporate communications and
communications management

Research materials and anecdotal evidence have in recent years been stacking up
supporting the view that organizations now increasingly approach their communi-
cations from an integrated perspective, and, what is more, primarily through the lens
of corporate communications instead of IC or IMC. This is evident in a number
of organizational changes and initiatives that emphasize the adoption of corporate
communications, including the following:

1. A greater consolidation of communications disciplines. Instead of being dispersed
over an organization or delegated to other functions (such as Finance and Human
Resources),communications disciplines have increasingly been brought together and
consolidated into departments or as the responsibility of a single communications
manager (see also Chapter 5 for a more detailed look at the subject of organizing
communications). Many organizations in the US, UK, continental Europe and else-
where have consolidated communications disciplines as media relations, government
relations, employee communications, community relations, investor relations, corpo-
rate design and issues management into ‘corporate affairs’,‘public relations’or ‘commu-
nications’ departments, while disciplines such as branding, advertising, promotions
and direct marketing are put under the marketing department.This greater consoli-
dation of communications disciplines, yet still in separate corporate affairs or public
relations and marketing departments, not only emphasizes the expanded scope and
breadth of disciplines and expertise that is now available, but also the more holistic
view of communications that most organizations are now taking.