Page 58 - Corporate Communication

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Marketing, Public Relations and Corporate Communications 47

2. Increased coordination from a corporate perspective. While communications
disciplines are still often organized into separate departments, organizations have also
increasingly recognized that fragmentation needs to be tackled by having a mana-
gerial framework from where both public relations and marketing communications
disciplines are guided and coordinated. The widespread existence of coordinating
bodies and the increasing use of a consensus approach to decision making (where the
heads of various communications disciplines work together to develop communica-
tions strategies) attest to this integrated approach to communications that is now
taken in many organizations in the US, UK and elsewhere. Importantly, such coor-
dination and decision making takes place between practitioners from various public
relations (or corporate affairs) and marketing communications disciplines, under-
lining the fact that organizations undertake the management and integration of their
communications activities from a total organizational or corporate perspective, and
not just from a marketing perspective as the concept of IMC would suggest. In other
words, IMC has lost ground to corporate communications as the guiding managerial
framework for communications management.
3. More input of communications into management decision making. Communications
departments and practitioners now also increasingly enjoy a high position in the
organization’s hierarchical structure; in some organizations senior communications
practitioners are even members of their organization’s management team (or support
this management team in a direct reporting or advisory capacity). Companies such
as Marks & Spencer and Sony have recently promoted their most senior communi-
cations director to a seat on the executive board.Such moves,of which there are now
plenty across the business world, affirm and formalize the strategic involvement of
communications at the corporate level and credit corporate communications as a
strategic management function charged with strategically guiding and managing
relationships with an organization’s stakeholders (rather than as a technical support
function for other managerial functions and as largely concerned with putting
communications to work to effectuate management decisions).

4. The rise of the corporate communications manager. Not only are communications
disciplines to a greater extent consolidated and coordinated than before, but the last
15 years or so have also seen the rise of the corporate communications manager.This
is a ‘new style’ manager who is able to take a more strategic and holistic perspective
on communications, and is also more business savvy than his/her predecessors – the
old-style public relations tactician and advertising man. A survey of Fortune 500
companies regarding the status of communications managers in 1985 indicated that
the position of the corporate communications manager existed in 84 per cent of
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the sample and that on average the position had existed for a period of 11 years!
More recent analyses in the Netherlands in 1995 and France in 1998 provide further
support for this new style corporate communications manager. Corporate commu-
nications managers working across the Netherlands and France in companies such as
ABN-AMRO, BNP, Air France, Philips and Renault were found to embody the
holistic perspective that is needed ‘to take on responsibility for the communications
strategy’ and ‘have bridged the traditional gaps between public relations and market-
ing communication’.The closing of these gaps,both studies suggest,is due to the fact