Discuss about the Corporate Communications Strategy.
Communication strategy is “a holistic approach to engaging brand’s audience to ensure greater effectiveness[1].” A good communication strategy is a vital to achieve marketing goals. Developing an effective communication strategy is not a simple task, and requires new mind-sets and adequate processes. An organization must have a sound communication strategy to establish and maintain good public relations and promote its brand. This paper provides a critical analysis on the corporate communication strategy by first focusing on the components and the process of the strategic communication. The subsequent section analyses the strategic plan and execution. The final part of the paper concentrates on the message and persuasion theories. The paper identifies communications strategy as an integral part of the organization that must be given special attention to achieve the overall strategy.
The main of components of communication strategy include objective, budget, target, a guiding area, channel choices, integration, and measurement. Objective is the most fundamental component of communication strategy. Due to media and content permutation, planning a multi-content, multi-channel, and multi-market communication has become more complex, which necessities development of a fixed-point objective[2]. Adopting the right kind of objective enables the organization run things smoothly. The objective must be aligned with the organizational commercial goals. For instance if Apple Inc. wants to justify its high prices, it ensures that it builds a cachet appeal for its brand. Most organizations adjust their prices upwards to improve revenue income[3]. Most importantly, the objective should not be “too far down from decision-making tree[4].” Communication is not a panacea to all business problems; rather, it is meant imparting information, creating awareness, and creating imagery. Aligning communication objective with business tools leverage the company’s chances of accomplishing commercial success.
To underscore good communication strategy, budget must be consistent in communicating the objectives and communication. Inextricability of the link between the two components of communication is paramount to make the communication strategy effective[5]. Astoundingly, most organizations harbour huge ambitions with disproportionately small budgets. Brand communication is not as simple as it may look. Rather, an elaborate task requires sufficient allocation of funds to be successful. The modern consumer is quintessentially predisposed to hearing commercial messages and therefore the organization must invest in methods that can make their mode of communication interesting. Some of the techniques that an organization can employ to set budgets include “advertising-to-sales ratios per market sector,” the cost per coverage of the content, matching share-of-voice to share share-of-market, and frequency against the target audience[6]. Modern corporate organizations link better communication strategy to effective advertising. Therefore, an organization must have a budget for communication to facilitate communication strategy.
At minimum, the brand should have a well-defined target[7]. Prior to target identification, the organization should conduct a quantitative and a qualitative research to gain valuable information about the target audience. For instance, if a company wants to introduce a new product, it must establish the potential of the existing and the potential customers to accept the new product. Once the organization has gathered adequate information about the consumer preference, it can use the data or strategic analysis to develop effective communication strategy. The company can define audience in terms of intermediaries, which include retailers, agents, wholesalers, brokers, and franchisees; user types, which include loyal, promiscuous, frequent, or occasional; and lifestyle, for instance individuals’ spending habits and their attitude towards brand labels[8].
Guiding idea is at the central nerve of an ideal communication strategy[9]. A guiding idea ensures that consumers concentrate on the content of the message. The idea also helps the communication strategy team to select ideal channel or media. However, the communication budget set should be integrated into the idea to enhance the effectiveness of the communication strategy. Corporates should be able to draw a distinction between communication idea and advertising idea to ensure that they have idea that can fit in all the channels, and not confined to broadcast advertising[10]. To improve the outcome of communication strategy, the organization must focus on “connection idea” instead of a creative idea.
On channel choices, corporate organizations should take into consideration the evolution of the media landscape, and should not rely on the assumptions to decide what channel to use[11]. One of the mistakes that most organizations make is that they assume that they only require paid-for media to connect with consumers. Unfortunately, they fail to recognize the presence and significance of PR and promotional paths as well as existing opportunities in user-generated content, live branding experience, and advertiser-funded programming. Corporates should not just focus on mass coverage, but should narrow down to specific target by intensifying engagements on small groups to promote interaction with the brand. The organization should also select channels that foster consumer feedback, for instance social media platforms.
The organization should ensure that the channels it has chosen integrate with each other to produce multiplier effect[12]. For instance, the organization can create matching luggage to consolidate imagery appearance in all channels by using celebrity appearance in PR and adverts. The last component is measurement, which is “one of the most underdeveloped areas of communication strategy[13].” Analysing the effectiveness of communication in terms of the selected channels and integration is difficult due to lack of standard definition of constituents of effectiveness. Another reason for this backlash is that most research have concentrated on how to conduct efficient advertising and select the best advertising channel but they have neglected findings on how to establish effectiveness of the channels.
The first step towards planning for corporate strategy is conducting environmental assessment[14]. The environmental scan should focus on the external factors and the media in particular. Some of the techniques that can be employed in this task include SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) Analysis and PESTEL (Political, Economic, Social, Environmental, and Legal) analysis[15]. These two strategic analysis approaches enables the strategic management team to conceptualize the competitors’ actions, political dynamics, legislative context, economic trajectories, and consumer behaviours.
After conducting the external environmental analysis, the strategic communication management narrow down to stakeholder analysis. This involves assessing the individuals who are directly linked to the initiative. The stakeholder analysis should encompass their perception, their experiences with the previous strategy as well as their expectations.[16] Stakeholder analysis enables the communication strategic team to acquire valuable support in terms what media materials are effective, attendance on various media events, and consumers’ perception about the announcement. Consulting with stakeholders also enables the strategic to mitigate potential challenges.
Most importantly, planning communication strategy should be accompanied by objectives[17]. Well-defined objectives enable corporate strategic team to establish the role of the communication and what type of media to choose for the function. In addition, objectives act as a blueprint create or build support on demand, improve the company’s image, and generate offline or online coverage. A sound objective should be realistic, time-focused, specific, achievable, and measurable[18]. The objectives should also have lasting impression— the main thing that the organization wants customers to remember about the initiative.
Once the strategic team has formulated communication objectives, it defines the communication strategy. Strategy defines how to achieve the identified objectives. Adequate external environment analysis and well-defined feasible objectives pave way for the communication strategy to flow smoothly[19]. However, if the strategy does not meet the intended objective, the strategic team should go back to the drawing board and re-establish if the communication objectives meet the aforementioned features of an ideal objective.
Essentially, the strategy should contain the profile to define the degree of coverage that the strategic team intends to achieve— low-profile communication or high-profile communication. The strategy can be either proactive or reactive depending on the degree of coverage[20]. Ideally, high-profile strategy robustly works with proactive approach while low-profile strategy produces effectual results when it aligned with reactive approach. The strategy should also constitute the medium that the organization will use to achieve the communication strategy. It it is imperative the strategic team re-examine if the strategy is consistent with objectives and ensure there is no confusion between strategy and tactics. The former helps to formulate and frame future decision while the latter involve “specific activities and outputs through which strategies are implemented[21].”
Once the strategic team has settled on what strategies to employ, it should now focus on the audiences. The strategic team should think back and focus on whom it wants the information to reach. This includes analysing the customers’ needs and what initiatives to undertake to accomplish the strategy. The strategic team should be thorough and take adequate measures to ensure that there are no gaps in the target audience. Some of the sources that organization can use as ideal sources of audience include media, internal employees, industry analysts, business groups, and online audiences[22]. The communication content should be precise, and if possible, the strategic team should break it down to accentuate specific niches. For instance if the target is to attract shareholders, the company should focus on publicizing information about the company’s financial health on business journals and articles.
After re-evaluating the audience behaviours, the strategic team now shifts attention to announcement. Announcement represents the executive summary of the communication strategy. The team first highlights the type of announcement they plant to undertake by accentuating important messages and tactics. The announcement should be simple to so that the executive can easily conceptualize and approve the plan[23]. To underscore simplicity, the strategic team should concentrate on identification of announcement they are drafting and the reason behind making the announcement. The strategic team should be honest and elaborate how the announcement fits the organization’s overall strategy.
After making the announcement and subsequently receiving the executive approval, the strategic management team now focus on designing messages to execute communication plan. The message is very critical element in communication strategy since it influences the audience behaviour to make decisions. The key elements of messages should be consistent with the objectives, communicate the objectives, communicate what is new, and reach the target audience. Messages should be precise and concise. The strategic team considers the set objectives to ensure it does not deviate from the intended plan. Considerably, the team should engage the audience to produce desirable effect.
Once the strategic management team is ascertained that the messages are properly designed, it employs tactics to actualize the strategy. Tactics may vary depending on the type of communication profile, environmental scan, and medium of communication the organization adopts[24]. Flowing communication plan facilitates the effectiveness of the selected tactics. A sound communication tactic should be comprehensive to address the audience needs. Some of the tactical options include media events, brochures, blogger relations, social media outreach, email newsletters, and advertising.
The next step is to identify issues before they culminate to crisis. This includes social dynamics, controversies, preferences, rumours, and emotional impact. After issue identification, the strategic team— with help of the executive— should establish techniques of mitigating them[25]. As already mentioned in the components of the communication strategy, adequate budget is paramount to ensure the communication is effective. However, this section emphasizes on budget proposal. Low profile and reactive communications requires lower expenditure compared to the high profile and proactive communication.
The final stage is evaluation. During this phase, the strategic team accounts for the tactics employed in PR campaign. The team also review the consumer response and the role of the media in facilitating the communication.
An ideal strategic plan enhances strategy execution. Some of the factors that facilitate strategic plan implementation are communication of the strategy through the whole organization, employees’ engagement during implementation, organizational culture, and management of effective controls[26]. To promote implementation of strategy, the executive should avail adequate resources in terms of funds and expertise. Besides, the strategic management team should consistently communicate the progress to stakeholders. The feedback enables the organization to help with monitoring the progress through quality management and provision of additional resources. In addition, the management should consider the implantation of the strategy as a top priority. Essentially, the strategic team management should identify common threats without engendering fear. High performing organizations use threats to motivate employees by providing platform for innovation and idea sharing[27].
One of the common theory in effective message and persuasion is market response theory[28]. The theory postulates that there is a direct connection between consumer spending behaviour, advertising, volume of sales, brand choice, market share. The theory is dichotomously dimensional: individual and aggregate. Individual dimension focuses on the consumer’s choice of brand and the degree of exposure that is sufficient to alter the consumer’s behaviour. On the other hand, aggregate dimension emphasizes on the relationship between the market share and brand sales on one wing and market data on spending habits on the other wing.
Another theory of persuasion is cognitive response theory[29]. The theory is based on the assumption that advertising has great influence on the consumers’ rational decision about a product. The fundamental objective of the advertising message is to address the issues of search and information cost. The theory assumes that in there two types of goods in the market: those that consumer has experience and those that the consumer has to search about them. Consumer also evaluates price and relate it with quality and quantity to make decisions.
Affective response theory states that consumers’ preferences based on the pleasure or feeling they derive from the “exposure to the message” has little dismal effect on the choices they make[30]. Advertisements should be conducted repeatedly to produce the desired effect. However, too much exposure to the message loses the effectiveness of the advertisement
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