Storytelling & Corporate Communication

What is corporate communication?

Corporate communication is a set of activities involved in managing and orchestrating all internal and external communications aimed at creating favorable point of view among stakeholders on which the company depends (Fombrun, 2007). 

Corporate communication is the tool used to keep up dialogue between corporation and stakeholders. It is the link between the corporation and all entities involved in order to achieve its planned objective as the corporation cannot achieve this on its own.

Corporate communication stems from two fields, internal and external communication.

Up until the late 70’s the term public relations was used to describe communication with stakeholders. Corporate communication was turned into a tool when internal and external stakeholders started demanding more information about the company.

The diagram shows how the different forms of corporate communication are divided and linked together. Each of these factors are equally important as they affect the companies image.

Who are stakeholders?

A stakeholder is a person, group or entity that has interest or concern in an organization. Stakeholders are often affected by the organizations actions but it doesn’t necessarily mean they own shares or have any capital invested in the organization. Stakeholders can be creditors, employees, suppliers, owners, unions and the community. This also works vice-versa, all entities that can affect an organization are stakeholders.

Identifying and grouping stakeholders is increasingly difficult as it is relative to the objective at hand. For example an employee with shares may view corporate cost-cutting completely different to an employee without shares (Hutt, 2010). Categorizing stakeholders is essential as too much

 Stakeholder engagement is crucial to a firms success as no firm lives in isolation and while dialogue is not new between stakeholder and corporation, it is rising to be a crucial part of success with respect to business strategy (The Future 500, 2007).

How to communicate with stakeholders?

Identifying the best stakeholders to communicate with is crucial, however actually communicating with them and keeping them involved is another issue. When targeting each of your stakeholder groups you need to identify the following things:

-          Who the stakeholders are and at what level do they need to be involved?

-          What are the needs and interests of each stakeholder?

-          How do you communicate with each stakeholder, what method?

-          Frequency of communication

Communication and transparency however aren’t the only ingredients required for a good relationship between stakeholders and organization.  Ipsos MORI, Social Research Institute wrote a paper where they explained the importance of stakeholders and why the public sector is struggling because of their lack of stakeholder understanding.

Above is a diagram which shows the similarities in companies which have a very strong relationship with their stakeholders. For example Apple and Toyota (2009). A bad company with weak leadership and unclear goals cannot achieve a good relationship with their stakeholders, making communication with them irrelevant. 

Effective storytelling

Storytelling is becoming more important in the corporate world when communicating with stakeholders. The old way of introducing a product and marketing the product by showing off specs and new technology isn't enough to persuade stakeholders to get excited about the business.

Through storytelling, corporations can effectively inspire others by engaging stakeholders' emotions. Stakeholders will remember the story and the objectives connected to it, thus inspiring them to help achieve this goal if the story is well told. Adverts, like the Google advert which reunites two old friends make corporations seem humane and approachable. 

It is however important to have an effective story, one that people can relate to and see value in. This can backfire drastically if the story is off, for example the advert from Samsung which tries to promote their smart watch. It tells a story of how the guy gets the girl because he can do cool things with his smart watch. It is exaggerated which makes it difficult to relate to and this makes the viewer see little value in the product. The situations that are presented in this advert are ones that just wouldn't happen, ever. 

That video is a great example of corporate storytelling gone wrong.

References:

Riel, Cees B.M. van; Fombrun, Charles J. (2007). Essentials Of Corporate Communication: Abingdon & New York: Routledge

Roger W. Hutt, (2010),"Identifying and mapping stakeholders: an industry case study"

The Future 500 (2007), “Stakeholder engagement”