Corporate Communication: Strategy, Public Relations, and Influence

Posted on Sep 16, 2025 in Arts and Humanities

The Practice of Corporate Communication

This section covers the importance of strategy in communication, communication programs and plans, and the industry of Corporate Communication and Public Relations.

Theory of Corporate Communication: Key Concepts

Related concepts and elements include:

  • Propaganda
  • Public Relations
  • Corporate Communication

Understanding the Legitimacy Gap

The legitimacy gap represents the perceived difference between an institution’s performance and a society’s expectations for right and proper performance.

Defining Corporate Communication

Corporate communication is the exchange of information. It is vital to be effective, helping in creating and maintaining goodwill with publics. It shows the world who an organization is and connects its image with its identity. It is a management function that offers a framework for the effective coordination of all internal and external communication with the overall purpose of establishing and maintaining favorable reputations with stakeholder groups upon which the organization is dependent.

The Art of Storytelling in Communication

Storytelling is the art in which a teller conveys a message (truth, information, knowledge, or wisdom) to an audience—often subliminally—in an entertaining way, using whatever skills to enhance the audience’s enjoyment, retention, and/or understanding of the message conveyed. An example is the brand Campofrio.

Christian Salom on Why Storytelling Works

According to Christian Salom, storytelling works because:

  • We prefer engaging with narratives to wrestling with raw data.
  • We are inclined to accept those claims that fit our narratives.
  • It is easier for people to sell us a story than it is for them to convince us of isolated facts.

Advertisers, politicians, and communicators are aware of these tendencies.

What is Public Affairs?

Public affairs can be defined as a specialized part of public relations that builds and maintains organizational relationships (corporate relationships) with governmental agencies and also with community stakeholders to influence public policies.

Lobbying: Influencing Government Policy

Lobbying is a specialized part of public relations and public affairs that builds and maintains relationships with the government, primarily to influence legislation and regulations. The stakeholders of lobbying are members of the government. Public affairs is a little bit wider than lobbying.

Event Planning and Publicity Stunts

Event planning involves designing planned events to attract the public’s, people’s, and media’s attention to an organizer or its cause. This is often a stunt that generates publicity.

Understanding Publicity

Publicity is the unpaid dissemination of facts, ideas, news, or products about a specific brand, person, or organization. Publicity is not advertising; it is unpaid.

The Four P’s of Public Relations

  1. Purpose
  2. Principles: It is difficult to communicate without your principles and values.
  3. People: Always remember you deal with people, not consumers.
  4. Processes: Communication is a process (there are four steps). Everything has a consequence, and you have to follow up on the process.

Key Characteristics of Corporate Communication

Corporate communication:

  • Is about relationship building and reputation management.
  • Must create value for the organization.
  • Reputation is a long-term indicator of communication’s value creation.
  • Includes deliberate efforts to formally communicate.
  • Is the voice that corporations and institutions use to interact with the outside world and includes many activities.
  • Happens when an organization needs to communicate a message to inform and/or persuade public opinion, consumers, media, investors, and other stakeholders.

Developing a Communication Plan

A communication plan is defined as “the formulation and implementation of an organization’s communication strategy in several steps.” A communication plan is strategic because:

  • It is scientifically managed, not spontaneous.
  • It includes goals and objectives.
  • It depends on the overall strategy of the company.
  • It must be related to the mission, vision, and values of the organization. A communication plan is not independent.

The mission is supposed to remain unchanged over time, distinguishing it from the vision.

The Four Steps of a Communication Plan

  1. Research and problem statement: What’s happening?
  2. Planning and programming: What should we change?
  3. Implementation or communication: What should we do and say? Who? When? Where? How?
  4. Evaluation: How are we doing or how did we do?

Understanding Propaganda

Propaganda: The deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions—sometimes manipulate cognition—and direct behaviors to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist. It often uses a one-way communication model. Contents include: opinion, symbols, ideas, selected metaphors/images, and emotions to enlist public support for the propagandist’s opinion. This sometimes involves psychological manipulation.

The Five Stages of the Communication Continuum

  1. Dialogue:
    • Active participation on both sides, a two-way communication dialogue.
    • A balanced situation where the sender and the receiver are on the same level.
    • Ultimately, there is an exchange of information.
  2. Education:
    • The sender tries to remedy the ignorance of the recipient on a very particular subject.
    • At the beginning of the process, there is a slight imbalance favorable to the sender.
    • There is rationality; the recipient at the end of the process should be able to use their own criteria to judge reality.
  3. Persuasion:
    • At the end of the process, the sender tries to make the recipient share their own criteria to judge reality.
    • The recipient is aware that they are being persuaded.
    • The sender works not only on the ignorance but also on the neutrality of the recipient on one specific topic.
    • The difference between education and persuasion is that in persuasion, the sender tries to make the recipient share their own criteria to judge reality, and the recipient is aware of being persuaded.
  4. Manipulation:
    • The information relationship here is completely unbalanced, tilted towards the sender.
    • The sender pursues their own interest and does so without respecting the intellectual freedom of the recipient.
    • At the end of the process, the recipient will not be able to build their own criteria to judge reality.
    • Manipulation involves using lies and distorted information.
    • Features of manipulative speech are often present.
  5. Imposition:
    • There is no communication here; the message is imposed, with no exchange of anything.
    • All elementary rules of communication are broken.
    • There is no communicative relationship between the sender and the recipient.
    • Means are mostly violent, e.g., “If you don’t vote, I’ll kill you” (blackmail).
Types of Propaganda: White Propaganda

White propaganda comes from an identified source, and the information in the message tends to be accurate. An example could be religion when trying to spread an ideology, or state-sponsored media like Russian propaganda aiming to convince people of their ideology.

Types of Propaganda: Black Propaganda

Black propaganda involves a concealed source or one credited to a false authority, spreading lies, fabrications, and deceptions. It’s difficult to discern if the message is lying, and nowadays, it’s quite challenging for black propaganda to be effective. An example from WWII was Nazi broadcasting services.

Types of Propaganda: Grey Propaganda

Grey propaganda: The source may be correctly identified, and the accuracy of information is uncertain. Alternatively, the source may not be correctly identified, but the accuracy of the information is certain.

Types of Propaganda: Sub-Propaganda

Sub-propaganda: The propagandist’s task is to spread an unfamiliar doctrine through different stimuli and eventually have it accepted.

Types of Propaganda: Political Propaganda

Political propaganda is aimed at spreading information about those who are in power or want to be in power.

Types of Propaganda: Ideological Propaganda

Ideological propaganda is planned to spread an ideology or win over followers/converts to the propagandist’s ideology.

Types of Propaganda: War Propaganda

War propaganda, also known as psychological warfare, includes all informative actions made by the state to promote patriotism or hate (of enemies) among soldiers and public opinion.

Types of Propaganda: Commercial Propaganda

Commercial propaganda occurs when the sender wants to promote the acquisition or purchase of a good or service.

Types of Lobbying

Lobbying can be categorized into: Direct lobbying and Indirect lobbying.

Defining Marketing

Marketing is a set of actions aimed at achieving brand objectives by satisfying consumer needs and creating added value for products.

Understanding Identity Capital

Identity capital is capital which you build over time with everything you do. It increases when you do interesting things and decreases when you lie in bed all day.

Persuasion vs. Manipulation: Key Differences

Persuasion takes place when the sender of the message tries to take advantage of the receiver’s ignorance in order to shape their perception. Persuasion:

  • Distinguishes between arguments and conclusions.
  • Does not use an emotional approach.
  • Does not discredit other sources by attacking them.

With manipulation, the intellectual freedom of the receiver is not respected, and at the end of the process, the receiver does not have the freedom to judge reality. Manipulation:

  • Uses harmful stereotypes.
  • Tries to establish a common enemy to blame for everything.
  • Only selects facts that are beneficial for the manipulator.

Ecology in Public Relations (Cutlip & Center)

According to Scott Cutlip and Allen Center, ecology in PR is a concept that states that in order to prosper and endure, all organizations must accept the public responsibility imposed by an increasingly interdependent society, communicate despite barriers, and achieve integration in communities that they were created to serve.

Grunig’s Concept of Publics vs. Bernays’

According to Grunig, publics are a group of people affected by organizational behavior and groups of people that affect organizational behavior. People can change the way they think/act about a company. Grunig says you cannot read your audiences the same way over time because people change. He believes the average person and PR professionals share equal intellectual capacities. Bernays, on the contrary, believed in the limited intellectual capacity of the public.

Major Public Relations Consultancies

Some major PR consultancies include:

  • MSL Group
  • Edelman
  • Ogilvy
  • Hill & Knowlton
  • Blue Focus
  • Ketchum

Political Parties and the Two-Way Asymmetrical Model

According to purpose and the nature of communication, political parties nowadays, especially during election periods, practice the two-way asymmetrical model. Their purpose is scientific persuasion, and their nature of communication is two-way, with imbalanced effects. They research their audience to learn more about public behavior. Using this information, political parties try to change public opinion/perception by persuasion. This model is often associated with Edward Bernays.

War Propaganda in Disney Shorts

There are different criteria to determine types of propaganda. According to the object, the Disney shorts seen in class clearly used War Propaganda. War Propaganda (also known as psychological warfare) involves all informative actions by the state to promote patriotism or hate towards enemies among soldiers and public opinion. In all three short videos, the common theme was to promote patriotism. In the first two, Donald Duck in Nazi Land and Education for Death, viewers were persuaded to find the ideologies of the enemy (Nazi Germany) appalling and to mold the viewers’ perception.