What is Corporate Communications?
Corporate Communications means any communication emanating from a company or occurring within it. The word ‘corporate’ however refers to the whole body or corpus, and applies to any kind or organization regardless of whether it is in the private, public or not-for profit sector. The term encompasses total communication activities of a corporate body. It is also defined as ‘the total communication activity generated by a company to achieve its planned objectives’. Corporate Communication encompasses all communications of the company, including advertising, marketing, government relations, community relations and employee communication.
Top 10 best solutions for improving corporate communications
1. Strengthening Employee PR
The business of every organization is linked with the interests of its employees, shareholders and customers. It is the job of the management to see that each of these segments receives good treatment so that the corporation could engineer firm public support. Granted a corporation cannot exist without customers who buy its products and shareholders who invest in the company. But social scientists say that employees are the most important asset of a company as without them there would be no company either for the customers to patronize or for the shareholders to invest. Unfortunately, most of the organizations managements tend to ignore public relations to employees.
2. Financial PR – the backbone
The growth of any organization depends on men, money and material. To interpret facts on financial matters to shareholders and influence investment decision is a specialized area of public relations. The investing public can be divided into three categories – 1. Actual shareholders of public owned corporations; 2. Financial opinion leaders; 3. Financial journalists of both print and electronic media. A sound financial public relations program wins and keeps the support of stockholders and financial community. It also contributes to corporate profitability.
3. Customer’s PR – satisfying the king
Customer is the king. An organization and its employees are totally accountable to the master customer. The customer has certain inherent rights – the right to information and the right to know about the product or service. Customer PR is required to sustain customer relations and their satisfaction. Customer’s satisfaction certainly creates good reputation through its techniques by nurturing, maintaining and sustaining their satisfaction. This calls for a public relations oriented management. This is also required to find out what customers want. If customer relation is neglected, even a single incident can have serious consequences. One must adopt customer relations strategy depending on the nature of the organization and the type of customers.
4. Social Communication
The principals and techniques of communication as applied to creating awareness on social evils, issues and getting them eradicated from the society may be called social communication. If this task is undertaken by public relations professionals, it amounts to public relations communication for social causes. Mere communication messages will not eradicate social evils. They must be accompanied by action-oriented plans to solve social issues. Thus action plan and media strategy both assume importance to reach the objectives of social justice.
5. Sponsorships
Sponsorship may be described as an act of an organization or individual as a sponsor to promote the company by underwriting the cost of an event. It can be a form of advertising, or part of marketing strategy or can be a PR tactics. Sponsorships can provide goodwill by association, media coverage, market penetration, corporate identity, visibility of brand etc.
6. Community Relations – the business of service
In the wake of globalization and cut throat competitive market, organizations have to maintain good community relations. The company helps the community by providing employment to members of the society besides paying taxes for community development. The community provides the community land, water, power, fire protection, police service etc. A company therefore must accept its responsibility towards the community in which it operates not only by paying taxes and good but also taking active part in community life, supporting education, community health, recreational facilities etc. Thus in the process, the company is recognized by the community as a good corporate citizen and in return the company gets name and fame from the community. This is also known as Corporate Social Responsibility. This enhances company’s reputation.
7. Government Relations – the one all pervasive
Both public and private organizations benefit from government relations process by not only getting their views approved in policy-making but also by adjusting organizational goals according to the government policies. Every organization must establish government relations for creating and maintaining cordial relations with the government departments and the various regulatory bodies governing the industry.
8. Media Relations – a sacred mission
Media relations is a process of public relations to achieve maximum media coverage as a measure to create knowledge among the target audience and gain understanding towards organizational goals, products, services etc. Good media relations are created and maintained only through honest and newsworthy and public interest information provided in an atmosphere of mutual trust and understanding between public relations and media. News service of public interest is the watchword in media relations.
9. Crisis Management – when things go haywire
A crisis is an unpredictable major threat that has a negative effect on the organization and stakeholders. Public Relations is an anticipatory profession which must foresee problems confronting the organization. Notwithstanding careful planning, certain things can go wrong such as mass panic, running away from media, suppressing the truth etc.
Editor's note: Most articles submitted to Chillibreeze go through a selection process. Only 30 percent of submitted articles are accepted for publication on the Chillibreeze.com featured article list. All accepted articles are edited and proofread for glaring errors of punctuation and grammar. Sentence structure is changed in certain cases and sometimes, entire sections are rewritten. If you notice any errors that have slipped through the cracks, do let us know! (Email us at info at chillibreeze dot com).
Chillibreeze's disclaimer: This is a contributed article and was published on Chillibreeze in January, 2012. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the views of Chillibreeze as a company. Chillibreeze has a strict anti-plagiarism policy. Please contact us to report any copyright issues related to this article. The relevance of the facts and figures cited (if any) could change after a period of time.
Out of 5 “chilies”, our editorial team gave this article...
—About our writer:
Sarita Bose is a freelancer writer. She has completed many assignments that include web PR and marketing, content writing for web/SEO articles, instructional designing, advertising copy writing, copy writing for brochures, creative writing and more. She has a master’s degree in communication and works as a branding and corporate communications professional.
>> Read more articles written by Chillibreeze writers:
Chillibreeze offers Indian writers the opportunity to work on customer projects. We are also India’s biggest writer network and a one-stop shop for Indian writers and editors. The writers’ section on Chillibreeze offers freelance writers and editors a variety of tools to advance their careers. Resources for writers include:
