Page 80 - Corporate Communication

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Stakeholders, Identity and Reputation 69

products and services

ORGANIZATIONAL
IDENTITY
employee behaviour
Mission
Vision
Corporate culture

communications
CORPORATE
IDENTITY

Media reporting Word-of-mouth

REPUTATION of
stakeholders
(customers, local
communities,
investors, etc.)

Figure 3.3 Identity, reputation and stakeholder management

The above-mentioned points underline that the concept of identity is paramount to
organizations, the scope of their strategies, and how communications with stake-
holders are managed.The spectrum of identity involves at one end deep-seated ques-
tions concerning what the organization is and what it stands for, often referred to as
the organization’s identity or organizational identity.At the other end,identity involves
the act of expressing an image of the organization to stakeholders through all commu-
nications campaigns, employee behaviour and products and services. The manage-
ment of all such communications and expressions towards stakeholders is conceptually
referred to as corporate identity. Christensen and Cheney, two communications scholars,
suggest that because of these two sides to identity – organizational identity and cor-
porate identity – it ‘includes under its head both the strict sense of an organization’s
name or identifying emblems (e.g. logos) and the much broader sense of a system’s
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representations by/to itself and by/to others’. Figure 3.3 displays these two concepts
and their relationship to another central concept within corporate communications:
the reputation that stakeholders have of an organization.
Figure 3.3 spells out that organizations need to be conscious of the corporate
identity that they project to external stakeholders in order to achieve strong and
favoured reputations, and that this corporate identity needs to be managed, as well as
informed and guided, by the organizational identity: the organization’s core values.
Of course, reputations that stakeholders form of the organization are not only based