The Handbook of Strategic Communication

Carl H. Botan

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781118857236
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Scienze della comunicazione

Presents cocreational perspectives on current international practices and theories relevant to strategic communication

The Handbook of Strategic Communication brings together work from leading scholars and practitioners in the field to explore the many practical, national and cultural differences in modern approaches to strategic communication. Designed to provide a coherent understanding of strategic communication across various subfields, this authoritative volume familiarizes practitioners, researchers, and advanced students with an inclusive range of international practices, current theories, and contemporary debates and issues in this dynamic, multidisciplinary field.

This Handbook covers an expansive range of strategic communication models, theories, and applications, comprising two dozen in-depth chapters written by international scholars and practitioners. In-depth essays discuss the three core areas of strategic communication—public relations, marketing communication, and health communication—and their many subfields, such as political communication, issues management, crisis and risk communication, environmental and science communication, public diplomacy, disaster management, strategic communication for social movements and religious communities, and many others. This timely volume:

• Challenges common assumptions about the narrowness of strategic communication
• Highlights ongoing efforts to unify the understanding and practice of strategic communication across a range of subfields
• Discusses models and theories applied to diverse areas such as conflict resolution, research and evaluation, tobacco control, climate change, and counter terrorism strategic communication
• Examines current research and models of strategic communication, such as the application of the CAUSE Model to climate change communication
• Explores strategic communication approaches in various international contexts, including patient-oriented healthcare in Russia, road and tunnel safety in Norway, public sector communication in Turkey, and ethical conflict resolution in Guatemala

The Handbook of Strategic Communication is an indispensable resource for practitioners, researchers, scholars, and students involved in any aspect of strategic communication across its many subfields.

1
Strategic Communication
Field, Concepts, and the Cocreational Model

Carl H. Botan

George Mason University

This chapter has three goals. First, it offers a very brief outline of the field of strategic communication (SC). Second, it introduces and defines key terms and concepts in SC. Third, it introduces the cocreational model that influences several later chapters. In doing so, this chapter draws on work previously published by the author in 2018, also with Wiley-Blackwell (Botan, 2018).

One challenge faced by any book about SC is that SC is practiced mostly in two kinds of organization. The first is organizations that have a primary purpose of conducting SC campaigns. The core work of an organization, what it exists to do, is sometimes called the “line function” of the organization. Examples include PR firms, advertising firms, and some government health communication agencies. “whose primary or line function is SC.” For SC practitioners, the advantage of working in these firms is clear. Practitioners in this kind of organization work in an environment where the importance of SC work is highly valued when it comes to pay and promotions.

In contrast many, probably most, SC practitioners work in organizational cultures where something other than communication campaigns is the core function of the organization, its economic lifeblood. For example, they might work in a school system, digital provider, agriculture, or petroleums. In such cases, the practitioner is not at the center of the organization and is not the line function of the organization. Here SC may just be a support or staff function, as opposed to a line function. In these organizations, the value of SC work may not be fully understood and can be harder to measure than in organizations where SC is the line function. These practitioners may have to expend time and effort explaining what they do. Maybe more importantly, various kinds of SC work are often given different names. For example health and safety campaigns and HR benefits campaigns may be run out of different departments and under different names. So it can be hard to transfer ideas or employment between divisions of SC that conduct similar campaigns under very different names.

Strategic Communication Concepts and Terms

The term strategic communication may often be used mistakenly simply because it is a modern buzz term of the first rank. It is also sometimes intentionally used for puffery, or to make one’s work product sound more important than it really is, thus allowing them to charge more than if the term “strategic” were not used. It can also be used in good conscience by someone working as part of an SC campaign, such as a large marketing campaign, who mistakenly assumes that if they are working on a large complex campaign it must be strategic.

There is no one simple test, no single line to cross, in creating or identifying a strategic versus non-strategic campaign. But there are some key concepts that can be used to differentiate strategic from non-strategic communication campaigns. The next part of this section discusses six key concepts: information, strategic information, strategic communication, grand strategy, strategy, and tactics. Then, the relationships between the latter three.

Information

Information has been defined in many ways, for example Buckland (1991) distinguishes between information as process, information as knowledge, and information as thing. However, the most useful definition for those in SC is probably the very common view that information is something that reduces uncertainty (Daft & Lengel, 1986; Grahramani, 2006; Shannon & Weaver, 1963/1998). For example, if someone comes to you and tells you something you already know that does not serve as information to you but if they tell you something you did not know that provides you with new information by reducing your degree of uncertainty about a fact or situation.

Strategic Information

One issue that remains is that not all information contributes to any one SC campaign because not all uncertainty reduction applies to any one SC campaign. The uncertainty most important in SC is that which directly addresses the strategic needs of a campaign, particularly that which reduces uncertainty about how the publics think and feel about a client and the relationship that the client shares with their publics. This information has strategic value to a campaign planner, so it can be called strategic information to differentiate it from facts or data about things that do not impact the relationship between a client and publics.

Strategic Communication

There are many kinds of communication, which again, not all of are strategic. Here the term strategic communication is reserved for campaigns with two minimum characteristics. First, research is conducted about the environment and the situation in which a campaign is to be carried out. This research has to assess, again at a minimum, the current opinions of the significant publics including an assessment of how the purpose, or goals, of a proposed campaign comport with the reality on the ground. Second, a plan is developed encompassing available resources, timing, sequencing of steps, and assignments that takes into account both the goals of the organization and the feelings, needs, and attitudes of the publics. This plan is the actual strategy. A third possible characteristic is some kind of evaluative process centered on assessing differences between the starting and ending views and plans of the relevant publics. This is not strictly necessary for SC to exist but it is for skills to grow, and changes in the publics and external influencers to be adjusted for. Such an evaluation often also constitutes at least part of the research phase for another future campaign. The actual definition of SC used in the 2018 book is that

SC is the use of information flowing into the organization (research) to plan and carry out a communication campaign addressing the relationship between an organization and its publics. SC is research based and public centered rather than organization or message centered. (p. 8)

Further distinguishing between grand strategy, strategy, and tactics may help better explain the terms used here.

Grand Strategy

Grand strategy is the setting of policy, treaties, goals, and the like and is most easily seen in the case of a nation. Grand strategy is the domain of high government bodies that make treaties, set out policies, delineate goals, and apportion budgets. These act as directives for subordinate bodies such as the military and various ministries or departments. By analogy, in organizations where most SC campaigns are conducted, the policy level is the Board, CEO, President, or Executive Committee. These also set out policies, delineate goals, and apportion budgets, and set other parameters for SC campaigns that are conducted at the next level.

Strategy and Tactics

The literature on strategy is written from perspectives as different as business, military, religion, and politics, so it is not surprising that some authors might disagree on what strategy is. For example, although some have sought to draw a distinction between strategy and a plan (Mintzberg, 1994), many more tend to use the terms almost interchangeably. For most, a strategy is a plan, authorized by a decision at the policy level, the building of which takes into account at least current circumstances or conditions, a goal, and a set of steps for getting from the current situation to the goal. For example, Kay, McKiernan, and Faulkner (2003) state: “the definition of the objectives of the firm is the key to strategic formulation” (p. 28), which involves “information which a company can assemble about its environment and about itself” (p. 25).

As it is used in SC, we can define strategy as “the campaign level planning and decision making involving maneuvering and arranging resources and arguments to meet the needs of publics and organizational grand strategies” (Botan, 2018, p. 14). One could also think of strategy as a roadmap on which a plan for a trip can be laid out, while the actual driving is the tactic used to carry out that plan. Strategies are only a plan, an idea. It is the tactic that gives them substance. Thus, a strategy is not “better” or “higher” than the tactics because a plan is only an idea, without substance, unless given form and function through tactics.

Thus, tactics can be defined as “the specific activities and outputs through which strategies are implemented – the doing or technical aspects” (Botan, 2018, p. 14).

Relationship of Grand Strategy, Strategy, and Tactics

The relationship between grand strategy, strategy, and tactics is based on understanding level of analysis. Strategic communicators work at the level of the communication campaign. Grand strategy is a property of the higher policy level in relation to our campaign. Tactics are the actual implementation of the parts of a plan, so tactics are, in turn, subordinate to strategy. One’s position in this relationship, so strategy is subordinate to grand strategy can alter what is seen as strategy or tactics. For example, a higher authority may assign an SC department to plan a campaign that is strategic-level work for the SC department but maybe just tactical-level work from the perspective of the higher authority. Put another way, the level of analysis can differ depending on one’s position and role in a hierarchy but the level of analysis for SC itself does not vary, it remains at the campaign level.

Thus, strategy gets it guidance from the policy (grand strategy) level and strategy can have one or several subparts that can be thought of as sub-strategies. However, the only strategy or sub-strategies created should be necessary for addressing the policy in question. There should not be any of what I call “orphan strategies,” sub-strategies that are not directly part of responding to the policy/grand strategy. Likewise, a strategy may require from one to several tactics to implement it. However, there should never be orphan tactics that do not directly implement one or more strategies.

Finally, we can think of authority as moving downward from the policy level to the strategic level, and finally to the tactical level. Each is subordinate to those above it. But we can also think of concreteness, or “reality,” as flowing upward. Without actual tactics being applied both strategy and policy are just ideas, or wishes, without substance of their own.

Cocreational Model

Background

Botan and Taylor (2004) and Taylor and Botan (2006) introduced a model that they hoped would be the starting point for a change of assumptions and attitudes for many practitioners of SC. This cocreational model did not introduce new parts of the relationship with publics but was an attempt to depict what the present author had learned in the practitioner phase of his career that had changed his assumptions about the importance of some parts of that relationship. These authors sought to advocate a fundamentally different way of thinking about SC campaigns. In this sense, the cocreational model is close to serving as a normative theory in the way that Strough, Parker, and deBruin (2015) used the term when they said a normative theory is characterized by offering prescriptions or recommendations. Normative theories, they said, define “good decisions as one that most likely … provide the decision maker with [the] desired outcome” (p. 235).

Cocreational Scholarship

The cocreational school of thought w...