1. Week 7: Corporate Communication, Strategy and Reputation
1. Strategy: the basic message of a business.
1. A series of decisions and plan of action that determine behavior over time and must be communicated to others who act them out.
2. Strategy limits action because it forces choice.
3. Effective communication is based on strategy.
2. Reputation: The estimation in which a person, thing or action is held by others.
1. Attributed character.
2. Independent of an organization.
1. Linked to credibility and to esteem.
2. Collective esteem is part of a company’s reputation and credibility.
3. Exercise: Students critique their companies' strategies.
1. What is the stated strategy?
2. What is the real strategy?
3. NEXT week’s exercise: Select one person in your company departments and discuss how cultural differences may affect communication to this person.
4. Strategy and effective communication
1. Stated and real strategy.
2. Bound to individuals who comprise an organization and how each person interprets the content of a strategic message.
3. Strategy is both reactive and proactive.
4. Strategy is incremental over time.
5. Credibility is a critical component of strategy. What an organization does versus what it says it does.
6. A strategy incorporates objectives.
7. Good strategy is clear, simple and short.
8. Descriptive and prescriptive strategy and combined statements.
9. A strategic message outlines what a company plans to do and serves as a benchmark of what it does. Strategy should work at the bottom of an organization.
10. A strategic message must fit societal and governmental expectations. Strategic messages are bounded by public acceptability.
5. Reputation:
1. A company does not have one reputation but many.
2. The only reputations that count are those perceived by individuals who have the power to increased a company’s economic transactions or put it out of business.
3. Companies with poor reputations usually become the focus of investigation.
4. Firms can operate in the shadows.
5. A key role of corporate communication is to defend corporate reputation so that the company can operate. This has nothing to do with ethics or morality and everything to do with a company’s ability to survive.
6. Reputation measurement can never escape relativity.
6. Communicating the strategic message:
1. All communication starts with the receiver and works back to the sender.
2. Effective communication bidirectionally between sender and receiver, acceptance of the psychological state of the message receiver as a starting point, perception and fact.
3. Awareness, information, evaluation, trial, adoption and reinforcement.
4. Effective communication is often a messy process and linearity is an abstraction.
5. Accumulation model of persuasive communication. Exposure, short-term memory and long-term memory.
6. If there is no consensus among the CEO and top officers there will be no consensus below them.
7. Persistence and repetition.
8. Sometimes a product is a self-contained strategy and message and that is all the customer wants to know.
9. When a strategic message and reputation are important to the economic life of a company, managers must communicate them to every level.
10. . There is no correct way to apply a universal standard to decide what is successful communication of a strategic message or an appropriate reputation in the marketplace.
11. . Reputation is a concept with economic implications that defines the trust expressed toward a company by customers, influentials and other who ensure its survival and success.

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