"Corporate Communication is the means by which companies connect with customers, stakeholders & employees with 'One Look, One Voice'; Integrating Public-relations, Marketing-communications and Employee communications. Corporate Communication creates and protects the image and reputation of a company and its products, so that customers and employees identify with and feel good about the company they are working for and doing business with."
There are many theories of communication; the oldest theory is by a political scientist, Lance Wells. He gave his moral in 1948 which was a simple linear model consisting of the speaker, message, channel and listener. After the message, we usually expect a feedback but in 1948 people were only looking for effects and results. The word feedback came in the another model of communication. Given by Schramm, the model was cyclical and hence had the component of feedback. The communication theories form a bridge between the corporate communication and the firm’s overall corporate strategy.
So how does a Corporation develop its communication strategies? The first part of an effective communication strategy relates to finding the objective for the particular communication, the resources available to achieve those objectives in terms of money, medium, structure, time and finally analyzing the corporation’s reputation. These are the building blocks of upon which all other steps in acommunication strategy depend upon. A second set of issues that the company must face in order to place a fully beneficial communication strategy is to assess the constituents involved i.e. all the people that are going to be affected by the communication. These could be employees, customers, shareholders, communities, media, suppliers, government, creditors etc. The organization must know who their constituencies are for a particular communication strategy and find out what each thinks about the organization, and what each knows about the communication in question. Armed with this intelligence, the organization is ready to move to the final phase in setting a communication strategy i.e. determining how to deliver the message by choosing a communication channel and structuring the message carefully.
The framework for strategic communication is therefore a 3 step process which signifies that the communication is an ongoing process, with no end. The corporation communicates messages through proper channels to its constituencies, which are the employees, customers, media, government etc. The constituencies then give their responses back to the corporation. The corporation then communicates another set of messages back to the constituencies. Both internal and external factors are responsible for an increasing necessity towards strategic communications. Constituencies play a very important role in deciding the reputation of the corporation. Hence, organizations are continuously developing their communication strategies to diminish the potential loss in reputation.
For example, when I was doing my internship with Tata Indicom, the company had partnered with Mast Mobile Media to distribute interactive advertisements in Tata Zone BREW(R) applications. It supports ‘click-to’ actions including interactive voting, free ringtone download, coupons, SMS and call. Tata Indicom was also the first mobile operator to launch India’s First Internet Radio Service followed by Reliance Communications. They decided to communicate this to their constituents via press releases after carefuly looking into their communication strategies.
References
http://sloanreview.mit.edu/smr/issue/2005/spring/15/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Communication
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