Chapter 13Strategic Communication

Strategic Communication• Characteristics of Strategic Communication• The Traditional Perspective• The Interpretive Perspective• The Critical Perspective

Characteristics of Strategic Communication

• Models of Strategy• Strategic Communication as Public

Communication• The Source in Strategic Communication• Strategic Communication as Transaction

Models of Strategy

• Linear• Adaptive• Interpretive [Chafee, 1985]

Linear Model• Strategy consists of integrated decisions,

actions, or plans that will set and achieve viable organizational goals

• Reflects the most conventional and traditional understanding of strategy where top managers engage in a sequential, long-term planning process with rational decision making aimed at producing and controlling organizational change

Linear Model• Managers identify goals, generate alternatives

for achieving those goals, weigh the likelihood of success for each alternative, then they decide which alternatives to implement.

• Based on the older, machine-like notion of rational control in the traditional perspective.

• Strategic communication is concerned with presentation of managerial plans to stakeholders and with stakeholder acceptance of those plans.

Adaptive Model• Shifts the focus of strategy from sequential planning

and decisions about organizational goals to continuous adjustment of the relationship between the organization and its larger environment.

• The organization is an open system in a dynamic environment where the goal is represented by co-alignment of the organization with its environment.

• Co-alignment refers to matching up opportunities and risks in the environment with the capabilities and resources of the organization.

Adaptive Model• Although it is less centralized, less integrated, and

more multi-faceted than the linear model, it is nonetheless in the domain of top management responsibility.

• Based on the organic metaphor of system theory.• Strategic communication is more than just messages

aimed at informing and persuading stakeholders. It includes all of the communication processes involved in adaptation, i.e., the information exchange and feedback processes within the organization and interactions between the organization and its environment.

Interpretive Model• Concerned with the social construction of reality. • Based on a social contract view that portrays the

organization as a collection of cooperative agreements entered into by individuals with free will.

• Strategy is concerned with the management of meaning and with symbol construction aimed at legitimizing the organization by providing orienting metaphors or frames of reference that allow the organization and its environment to be understood by organizational stakeholders.

Interpretive Model• Strategy is embedded in metaphors and frames

of reference, and strategic communication is all about negotiating and shaping stakeholders’ understandings of what the organization is and what it does.

• Top management leads most of the shaping, orienting, and meaning management.

Strategic Communication as Public Communication

• Involves constructing and presenting messages to different organizational stakeholder groups

• Purpose ranges from presenting messages about products and services, to framing the organization’s mission, gaining acceptance for management’s plans, responding to a crisis or scandal, or promoting a merger or acquisition

Strategic Communication as Public Communication

• For large, complex, organizations, relevant audiences for strategic public communication include shareholders, employees, customers, government, media, activist groups, special interest coalitions, communities, and citizen-journalist web bloggers.

• Public communication can require a substantial commitment of resources: production facilities for websites, newsletters, company magazines, and video programs; advertising space in print and electronic media; time, space, and materials for special events; and salaries for the professionals who write, edit, and produce the messages, programs, and events.

The Source in Strategic Communication

• Conventional definitions of public communication treat the message source as a specific individual or agency (e.g., senior management).

• While this may apply in some situations, messages intended for strategic communication in organizations often are originated and produced by organizational subsystems composed of many individuals.

• Communication professionals often serve as a staff arm of top management to produce and execute a strategic communication program

Strategic Communication as Transaction

• Many strategic communication programs arise out of objectives derived through a linear model

• Strategic communication programs may also be developed through a transactional model where various organizational stakeholder groups (including customers, community members, and employees) participate in creating messages for public consumption

The Traditional Perspective

• Internal Communication• External Communication• Risk and Crisis Communication

Internal Communication

• Orientation and Indoctrination• Morale and Satisfaction• Compensation and Benefits• Organizational Change and

Development• Effective Employee Communications

Orientation and Indoctrination

• New employees arrive with a number of unanswered questions: What is the company philosophy? How does my job relate to the total organization? When do I receive my first paycheck? Where do I park my car?

• Many organizations provide answers to such questions through some type of formal orientation program.

• This program may include topics pertaining to the organization as a whole (policies, procedures, operating philosophy, and structure), your specific position (scope of authority, job duties, work procedures), and other personal concerns.

Orientation and Indoctrination

• The maintenance and integration functions of communication described in chapter 2 often are carried out in part through a continuous program of public communication aimed at indoctrination and socialization of organization members.

• Such programs often are intended to build an organizational image with the internal employee public and to present and reinforce specific values, beliefs, and practices.

Morale and Satisfaction• Messages that serve maintenance and human

functions help to promote morale and satisfaction. • Examples: an employee-of-the-month column in a

company magazine, notes about departmental accomplishments in the newsletter, and the discourse at special celebratory events are instances of messages that have as their primary objectives the improvement of members' self-concepts, interpersonal relationships, and attitudes toward the organization.

Compensation and Benefits

• The Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 requires organizations to make full and understandable disclosure of employee benefit programs.

• Benefit programs in large organizations can be very elaborate and very expensive.

• According to a study by the U. S. Chamber of Commerce (2006), benefit programs constituted more than 40% of payroll expenses in 2004.

• In 2005, 70% of employees in private industry had access to medical plans, and 60% had access to retirement plans.

Compensation and Benefits

• In addition to basic health protection and retirement plans, benefits programs also may include life insurance, disability insurance, credit union participation, use of company recreation facilities, child-care services, family and personal counseling services, profit-sharing plans, and other benefits.

• Benefits communication includes providing clear and accurate provision of information about benefits and it may involve promoting wellness programs and preventative care.

Organizational Change and Development

• Examples of Strategic Change: merger of different organizations in one entity, acquisition of one organization by another, major new ventures, restructuring, downsizing, or radical reengineering of core organizational processes and functions.

Organizational Change and Development

• Strategic change depends on backing from those who authorize change, accessibility in the sense that managers understand what they are working toward, specificity in terms of the detailed planning, and cultural receptivity, i.e., those affected by change are receptive enough to facilitate it. [Miller, 1997]

• Successful change also depends on propitiousness. Simply stated, accomplishing major change also requires some luck.

Effective Employee Communications

• Management is supportive. Top and middle management are directly involved in and responsible for communication.

• Professional communication staff members are well positioned, i.e., close to the issues and included in the strategic planning. Communication is integrated into other business processes and part of the business plan.

• Communication reinforces strategic objectives to all employees. Targeted messages are adapted to relevant audiences, but they also are consistent.

Effective Employee Communications

• Communication uses all appropriate media, but it privileges face-to-face communication over print and electronic media.

• The effectiveness of the communication program is assessed formally and frequently.

External Communication• Public Relations and Image Building• Public Affairs and Issues Management• Issues Management and Organizational

Change• Issues Management and Issues Advocacy

Public Relations and Image Building

• Image building is a process of creating the identity an organization wants its relevant publics to perceive.

• Image building involves an organization's attempt to cultivate a public impression that a set of positively valued features defines the essential character of the organization. [Goldhaber, 1993]

• Changing a corporate image requires developing and publicizing specific organizational characteristics and behaviors that are consistent with the image being cultivated.

Public Relations and Image Building

• The art of image building is associated with the field of public relations.

• Public relations has been defined as the management function which evaluates public attitudes, identifies the policies and procedures of an individual or an organization with the public interest, and executes a program of action to earn public understanding and acceptance.

• Farsighted, contemporary public relations practice is concerned with developing public appreciation of good organizational performance [Cutlip & Center, 1964]

Issues Management• The organized activity of identifying emerging

trends, concerns, or issues likely to affect an organization in the next few years and developing a wider and more positive range of organizational responses [Coates, Coates, Jarratt, and Heinz, 1986]

• Issues management in business emerged largely as a response to the activism of public interest and special interest groups and as a means of identifying, understanding, tracking, and acting on issues before they are subjected to public policy deliberations and decision making [Jones & Chase, 1979]

Issues Management• Public issues often represent adversity to

executives and managers precisely because they raise challenges to the organization’s established traditions and modes of operation

• Post (1978) characterizes organizational responses to public issues in light of two factors:– the organization’s stake in maintaining the status

quo (i.e., in continuing its current practices)– the perceived legitimacy of public complaints

against the status quo

Issues ManagementOrganizational Response to Public Issues• Organizations will avoid a public issue if both the

stakes and perceived legitimacy are low.• If the stakes are high and perceived legitimacy is low,

organizations tend to “stonewall” with cover-ups, distortions, and other methods.

• Where stakes are low and perceived legitimacy is high, the organization attempts to accommodate critics through some form of change.

• If both the stakes and perceived legitimacy are high, the organization attempts to collaborate with critics.

Issues Management• Issues management is concerned with emerging

issues whose definition and contending positions are evolving in the public arena and legislation or regulation is likely in a moving time frame of 18 to 36 months.

• Ewing (1979) described several techniques that organizations can use to track and predict the development of such issues. Some of the more common techniques include the following:

Issues Management• Trend extrapolation. A factor or variable is measured

over time and statistical forecasting techniques are used to project a trend from these measurements.

• Trend impact analysis. This technique is a variation on trend extrapolation. After a trend is extrapolated, experts identify future events that would affect the extrapolation and the trend is modified in light of these events.

• Scanning. A relatively simple technique in which issues that might affect an organization are identified and monitored by use of volunteers who regularly scan print and electronic media for useful information.

Issues Management• Monitoring. This method may be used in conjunction

with scanning. Scanning identifies potential issues, while monitoring tracks these issues through systematic analysis of data. Monitoring may include public opinion polling and other forms of social science research.

• Scenario writing. This technique begins by asking the question, “What would happen if X came to pass?” Given an assumption that X occurs, a chronological projection into the future is written.

Issues Management and Organizational Change

• Issues management may be followed by some form of adaptive change to accommodate the organization to the environment.

• General Electric and its ecomaginationTM project (GE’s effort to go green)

• The core elements of the program include a commitment to increase GE’s research investment in clean technologies to $1.5 billion per year by 2010, to realize more than half of its revenue from clean technology products by 2015, and to turn a projected 40% increase in its production of greenhouse gases into a net decrease of 1% by 2012.

Image Management and Issues Advocacy

• Issues advocacy addresses itself to specific controversial issues, presenting facts and arguments that project the sponsor’s viewpoint to try to influence political decisions by molding public opinion [Sethi, 1982]

• Pfizer advertised its Access program to help uninsured persons obtain free prescription drugs when politicians were debating addition of drug coverage to Medicare, an action opposed by Pfizer.

• The message was an image ad in appearance, but it functioned as an advocacy ad by implying that the Medicare drug program was unnecessary.

Risk Communication• Risk communication is the process of

communicating responsibly and effectively about the risk factors associated with industrial technologies, natural hazards, and human activities.

• Risk communication is not about managing risks, per se; it is about managing the divide between the expert and the non-expert to achieve an informed understanding of risks and benefits [Leiss, 2004]

Risk Communication• The basic responsibility of risk communication

practitioners is promotion of reasoned dialogue among stakeholders on the nature of the relevant risk factors and on acceptable risk management strategies.

• In order to fulfill this purpose, practitioners must understand how risks are perceived by relevant publics, be able to present expert risk assessments in ways that non-experts can understand, and help interested parties reach a shared understanding of risk [Leiss, 2004]

Crisis Communication• Crisis: a major, unpredictable event that has

potentially negative results and may significantly damage the organization [Barton, 1993]

• The purpose of crisis communication is to respond appropriately in such situations to minimize damage and maintain public confidence

Crisis Communication

• Crisis and Stakeholder Relationships• Factors in Crisis Communication• Public Bias in Crisis Communication

Crisis and Stakeholder Relationships

• Crisis communication in situations that affect the organization’s relationships with stakeholders, especially those that draw mass media attention, requires management of those relationships

• If you begin with the value of an organization and subtract from it the organization's material assets, what you have left is the value that perception creates

• You can lose that value in a nano-second in a crisis [Englehart, 1995]

Crisis and Stakeholder Relationships

• Benoit’s (1997) theory of image restoration• Concerned with crisis situations where relevant

audiences believe an organization to be responsible for an offensive act

• Response Options:– Denying Responsibility– Evading Responsibility– Reducing Offensiveness of the Act– Taking Corrective Action– Apologizing for the Act

Factors in Crisis Communication

• Planning and preparation for crisis events

• Behavior of the organization during the crisis (who does what when)

• Communication to important publics during the crisis

Factors in Crisis Communication

• Before a crisis occurs, messages should provide internalizing information to build positive public opinion toward the organization.

• When it appears that a crisis is imminent, the strategy should shift from internalizing messages to instructing messages that tell the public how to respond to the crisis.

• Instructing communication should increase greatly at the breakout stage of the crisis so that affected publics know what they are to do.

Factors in Crisis Communication

• As the crisis subsides, communication may shift to adjusting messages intended to help people cope with the effects of the crisis.

• As the crisis abates, the organization can return to an internalizing strategy.

Public Bias in Crisis Communication

• The scope of crisis communication is not just dissemination of messages to publics.

• Crisis management is also concerned with preventing or minimizing imminent loss, protecting or rescuing assets and people, and maintaining or recovering core functions.

• Crisis communication in a broader sense also includes the communication systems and processes necessary for coordinated action among those who respond to the crisis.

Interpretive Perspective

• Limits of the Effectiveness Model• Transactional Strategic Communication• Constraint and Crisis

Limits of the Effectiveness Model

• Effectiveness advocates attribute failure of strategic initiatives to ineffective communication and contend that there are, in fact, “best practices” for effective strategic communication.

• Although such practices may be useful, they do not assure success for strategic initiatives.

Transactional Strategic Communication

• When one assumes a linear perspective of strategy, it is easy to forget that communication is a transactional process

• Strategic consensus is critical for successful implementation of strategy

• Strategic consensus does not necessarily mean that members are in total agreement with and entirely committed to the strategy

• It does mean that members have constructed a common understanding of what it is

Transactional Strategic Communication

• Communication is a vital part of strategy implementation in a process through which organization members converge on commonly shared meanings

• This involves not only the message of top management to others in the organization, but others’ transactions among themselves.

Constraint and Crisis• Previous experience on communication and action in

crisis events can have potentially constraining effects.

• A cosmology episode occurs when the crisis situation creates an overwhelming sensation on the part of observers where all existing forms of sense-making fail to account for experiences.

• Self-organizing is a process whereby order re-emerges out of a random and chaotic state with new forms, structures, and procedures, often at a high level of order and complexity.

Critical Perspectives• Strategy and Hegemony• Coping with Power• Transformation and Strategic Communication

Strategy and Hegemony• Case Study of the TransAtlantic Business Dialogue

(TABD)• Developed in the 1990s by U. S. Secretary of

Commerce Ron Brown under the Clinton administration.

• The TABD promotes close commercial ties between the U.S. and European Union.

• TABD claims to do this through a dialogue system of input from public and civil society to foster a more integrated transatlantic marketplace.

• Presumably, this input from public and civil sources shapes TABD policy recommendations.

Strategy and Hegemony• Increased economic and political tension between

the European Union and United States in recent years has pushed the TABD into a dual rhetorical challenge

• Promoting its success to business and government participants to further its agenda while encountering a small but growing activist community protesting TABD's influence as an example of corporate hegemony [Zoller, 2004]

Strategy and Hegemony• TABD links dialogue with the public good and denies any

aims to weaken regulations on business, yet deregulatory goals are apparent in its public communication.

• TABD represents dialogue as civil participation and its own role as advisory and nongovernmental, but its goal is incorporation of its expert group recommendations into government policy.

• The effect of TABD’s strategy actually is to exclude multiple viewpoints from dialogue on trade and business policies: “Rather than contributing to increased public debate, the process forwards only business interests and only one version of those interests” [Zoller, 2004]

Coping with Power• Howard and Geist studied a 4,200-employee

public utility company that they identified with the pseudonym, California Gas and Power (CGP).

• CGP was engaged in a merger with a larger utility company, an effort supported by a strategic plan and a transition program.

• CGP’s identity and culture were based on espoused values of empowerment, openness, and participation.

• It also was a relatively small, secure, and family/community-oriented company.

Coping with Power• The merger decision set up a primary contradiction

between the desires of shareholders for increased profitability and the needs of the organization as a community of people, especially since the merger decision was essentially centralized.

• There were also secondary contradictions between change and stability (over the issue of job security), empowerment and powerlessness (the trade-off of the espoused value of participation against the non-participatory merger decision), and identification and estrangement (a company once promoting organizational identification and commitment, but now offering severance packages for people to go away).

Coping with Power• Organization members developed four distinct

ideological discourses to deal with the contradictions: invincibility, diplomacy, betrayal, and defection.

• Those who engaged in a discourse of invincibility represented themselves not only as accepting the merger, but also as immune from any negative consequences.

• The discourse of diplomacy simultaneously embraced the value of change while questioning the benefits of this merger, going along with the transition, hoping to remain in the merged organization, yet unwilling to renounce the values and culture of the unmerged CGP.

Coping with Power• Feelings of betrayal produced a discourse of

powerlessness, lost identity, and estrangement from the organization.

• A discourse of defection was used by employees who opted out, took the severance package, or just rejected the change and left.

Transformation and Strategic Change

• Executives who frame strategy certainly hope for it to have transformative effects in terms that they define, but strategic communication can be transformative for the organization in ways that may not be obvious.

• Livesey (2002) examined Shell’s first corporate social report issued in 1998, Profits and Principles: Does There Have to Be a Choice?

• Shell had made a strategic decision to embrace the concept of sustainable development.

Transformation and Strategic Change

• Shell described in detail how it intended to accomplish its new objectives with sustainable development and the issues and challenges that it would face in the process.

• Livesey noted that Shell’s report could be read from a fairly typically critical standpoint, i.e., simply as a corporate attempt to reestablish discursive regularity and hegemonic control in the wake of challenges by environmentalists and human rights activists.

Transformation and Strategic Change

• Livesey found instead that the corporation’s discourse on sustainable development had transforming effects on the company and on the idea of sustainability.

• Talk may be the vehicle for change; realization of alternatives happens in talk about alternatives. Words have effects. Shell’s words embodied commitments to actions, at least some of which are tangible and radical.