The Strategic Communication Imperative

For Mid- and Long-Term Issues Management

James Mahoney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000522099
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Pubbliche relazioni
• Index: Business

This book proposes a model for directly aligning strategic communication with organisational business planning to enable effective management of mid- to long-term organisational issues.

It argues that current conceptualisations of strategic communication need to be extended to locate it more precisely within definitions of strategy and as an essential element of mid- and long-term business planning. This approach re-positions strategic issues communication in a professional practice dimension that has a specific focus on issues that do not immediately impact on an organisation's ability to achieve its day-to-day business goals.

Full of contemporary examples from business, and including a thorough explanation of how the model can be applied in professional practice, the book will prove illuminating reading for scholars, students, and professionals alike.

1 Facing up to issuesAn introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003177340-1

During the worldwide Covid-19 virus epidemic that began in 2020, millions of words were published about what caused it, how it could be stopped and cured, the effect it had on societies, economies, and politics, and when it might end. And more. Pandemic issues, and how they affected every country, consumed politicians, public health specialists, medical researchers, and people who contracted the disease or lost loved ones to it. Defeating the virus was complicated by people who denied it even existed and ignored warnings about wearing face masks, the need for social distancing, and maintaining personal hygiene. In the United States in particular the existence of the virus was challenged, and responses to it were enmeshed in politics as some State governments defied official national and scientific advice about Covid-19 management, mask wearing, social distancing, and city and school closures. Such defiance was usually based on political party allegiance and individuals’ views about their rights to freedom under the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Former US President Donald Trump’s failure to effectively guide the national Covid-19 response became a major issue for him in his final year in office and contributed to his defeat at that year’s presidential election.

Worldwide, governments’ principal communication messages in their responses to the pandemic have focussed on dealing with immediate issues: the difficulties of controlling the spread of the virus to ensure public health, and, when vaccines became available, the need for citizens to be vaccinated. There remain urgent issues about how to deal with, slow down, and ultimately prevent Covid-19 infections, and to effectively manage the vaccination of populations. Government representatives, mainly politicians in executive cabinet positions, supported by medical experts, faced questions about why death rates were so high in some countries, about hospital care capabilities, vaccine availability, claims vaccines don’t work, dangerous side effects from vaccines, and about schools closing or opening. They were continually asked to explain why, and for how long, cities or whole countries would need to shut down in attempts to defeat the virus, and about government compensation for economic hardship during lockdowns.

Pandemic-related issues, and myriad others caused by them, will confront world governments, medical providers and researchers, and citizens for years as the mid- to long-term health, economic, social, and political consequences from the disease become clearer, especially the lasting medical complications for some people. Governments, especially, will need to develop strategic approaches to communicating about these issues in addition to their almost daily briefings about the pandemic. In Australia, which had one of the world’s lowest infection rates, one researcher argued that to understand the impact that Covid-19 could have in five years, experts needed to literally wait five years to look at the patient data (Roberts, 2021). And in the United States, a study reported that its results provided a roadmap to inform health system planning and development of multidisciplinary care strategies to reduce chronic health loss among Covid-19 survivors (Al-Aly et al., 2021).

In addition to long-term health issues likely from the pandemic, it is not yet known how working from home during the pandemic will affect the way in which people go about their daily lives post Covid-19: will they or won’t they continue to work, even for some of the time, from home, or will there be a mass return to offices? How will office spaces cater for a full return of workers if social distancing rules still apply? What will the consequences be for societies and their economies from a full return to formal in-office work, or will people stay in home-based work? Will life ever return to a so-called pre-Covid-19 ‘normal’? In this context, as the United States approached more than 33% of its population having been given at least one vaccination injection by the middle of 2021, one American CEO wrote about her concern that people might not want to go back to working in their offices post the pandemic. Merrill (2021) cited PricewaterhouseCoopers’ research that found fewer than one in five executives wanted to return to shared workplaces as they were before the pandemic. If this attitude continues, what workplace issues will organisational leaders have to deal with to resolve a problem of ‘absent’ executives?

Outside the specific issues that result from the pandemic, all organisations face emerging mid- to long-term concerns related to other social, political, and economic factors. Left unchallenged, emerging issues like these have the potential to impact on day-to-day business performance, or turn into crises. This is the strategic communication imperative for mid- to long-term issues identification and analysis and on which communicative action to deal with them should be based. This analysis and planning should occur well before issues impact on organisations, and be pursued in a context that reflects the goals, objectives, and timelines set out in organisational business strategies. If an organisation is not actively identifying and analysing longer term issues, and their potential impact on business performance beyond ‘today,’ especially those that could pose dangers to corporate reputations, organisational credibility, and stakeholder relationships, then it is not practising strategic issues management. In this concept, strategic communication is about the organisation, not the promotion of its products or services. A model for linking communicative action to effectively deal with emerging issues to strategic communication plans, and a new definition of strategic communication that clarifies its long-term role, are proposed in the book.

Using ‘organisation’ and ‘business’

In this book, the term ‘organisation’ is used to describe commercial businesses, not-for-profits, charities, industry and professional associations, government agencies, and political groupings. All are engaged in ‘business’ in the broad sense that it is what they actually do: make goods, provide services, pursue profits, protect individual and collective interests and rights, lead countries, or manage economies.

This approach recognises that ‘being strategic’ is not a day-to-day technical, tactical action. Day-to-day technical communication is about how organisations deal with current business issues like sales declines, or re-structures, or crises like labour unrest or the consequences of a factory fire, or misbehaviour by staff, or how they promote speeches, events, personalities, and products, produce issue media releases and background brief journalists, or tweet, re-tweet, and post to Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. That is not strategic, but communication using basic tools, no matter how much whizz-kid practitioners, political media advisers, journalists, and some academics, captured in by the wonders of social media, and their fondness for instant news media coverage as the capstone of professional practice, would like to label it otherwise. Senior US practitioners have suggested that the Covid-19 pandemic has provided a pivotal moment for communication professionals that would enable them to move on from the tactical alchemy that defines much communication practice. One senior communicator described this as an opportunity to ‘get out of the media relations spin cycle and demonstrate the breadth and depth of our value’ (K. Swim, cited in Strong, 2021).

All professional practice should reflect the context of an overall corporate communication strategy that defines goals and measurable objectives to address issues that organisations and their stakeholders face together. Deciding how, when, and why each tactical tool should be used with specific target audiences in equally specific situations is not an exercise in ‘more is better’ communication so common in modern professional practice. It should be carefully calibrated to match overall goals and objectives, directed at defined target audiences, and use the tactical tools that reflect those that audiences use. That means strategic communication practice needs to be understood in its own terms (Hay, 2002) beyond the traditional functional descriptions in the scholarly and professional literature of what communication strategy is and how it works.

So, corporate-level strategic communication is not some re-named variant of day-to-day tactical marketing communication. As an important, valid, and agenda-setting discipline in its own right, it is an organisational imperative, time defined in both its planning and implementation, and integrated with business strategy. Properly executed strategic communication deals with issues beyond the market, short-term financial performance, current political agendas, and the news media’s latest fascination, although much professional practice and scholarly discussion about communication would suggest otherwise. The argument advanced in this book is informed by primary and secondary research which found that decisions by senior practitioners about strategy are primarily influenced by issues that affect organisational reputations, credibility, and stakeholder relationships, and that they are mostly willing to engage with opponents over issues, but are often driven by senior managers to pursue short-term tactical methods. Communication strategies would be more effective if they were planned, linked, and implemented in the context of mid- and long-term business planning time frames because building and maintaining, or repairing, reputations, credibility, and stakeholder engagement is not a short-term activity. It takes time to do this, and these issues cannot be resolved by tactical communication. That is, strategic communication does not deliver results ‘today’ because it is about changing awareness, attitudes, and understanding, and generating action.

Researching and writing a corporate-level strategic communication plan should primarily be driven by the need for organisations to contribute to, and thus influence, public discussion of socio-economic and political issues that affect relationships with their stakeholders, the impact on their reputations, and, ultimately, their ability to achieve organisational goals. This is equally true of issues raised by organisations themselves in an endeavour to build enhanced business environments and which become the subjects of public debate. There is a duality in this process as the parameters of public debates about issues constantly change and these dynamics in turn influence how organisations continue to advocate their views on public issues. This is especially so if making those decisions is conceptualised as a highly politicised and discursive social practice aimed at generating action (Hendry, (2002) principally to build and protect organisational reputations, values, and credibility, and to develop, maintain, and advance relationships with stakeholders, in the mid to long terms. Dealing with reputational and relationship issues requires consistent professional communication endeavours that link directly to mid- to long-term organisational aspirations, goals, and objectives. This in turn requires an understanding of what strategy really is, how it is influenced by external factors and internal debates, and how organisations, represented by their spokespeople or agents, are social actors when they engage with public issues debates. Hence, communication action should be planned to reflect business planning time frames, principally the three planning ‘horizons’—the current, mid, and long terms—proposed by Baghai et al. (2000). Applied to this planning model, tactical communication occurs in the current term, leaving the other two ‘horizons’ as the arenas for strategic communicative action based on longer term issues analysis. This time-defined notion of strategic communication appropriately applies not only to commercial business, but to public sector and not-for-profit organisations, as well as in a party-political context, because it is concerned with issues that occur at a level above the immediate tactical approach of public relations, public affairs, and corporate and political communication.

Facing up to issues using a strategic focus to identify and analyse emerging external socio-economic and political concerns is needed precisely because left unidentified, and thus ignored, or unchallenged, these issues can potentially damage an organisation’s ability to go about its business, protect and grow its market share, and generate profits. Immediate marketing concerns of course impact on financial performance and many have ‘strategic’ dimensions in the sense that they determine how organisations will, for example, grow their customer bases, diversify their product offerings, consolidate supply lines, and reduce costs, thus enhancing financial performance. These concerns are likely to be identified and addressed as an organisation interacts daily with customers, suppliers, and competitors in a contemporary time frame. This is the day-to-day realm of marketing communication—advertising, direct selling, and the technical and tactical public relations and its various offshoots like public affairs and corporate communication. It is not the arena in which strategic communication and the management of potentially damaging emerging political, social, and economic issues play out. That occurs in a different context—the space where organisations interact with their stakeholders to reach a consensus about issues. Resolving these issues, for example, the long-term effects of Covid-19, industry regulation, industry policy, tariffs, government funding for education, subsidies for farmers, or the matters raised by activists pursuing specific interests like protection of the natural environment, and increased corporate taxation, requires organisations to engage with bureaucratic decision-makers, regulators, suppliers, politicians, industry associations, activists, and other issues definers, and often in public discourse. That is not the task of tactical and technical marketing communication focussed on the bottom line, no matter how much some scholars and practitioners want it to be so.

Increased activism about minority rights and ingrained misogyny and abuse of women in politics, business, sport, and government agencies are among the most significant issues organisations face. Negative reactions to electoral law changes in some US jurisdictions that limit access to elector registration and voting processes, which, for example, in 2021 saw businesses and sporting organisations withdraw activity from the State of Georgia, is an example of how failure to resolve issues impacts on an organisation’s relationships—its day-to-day performance. In this example the organisation was a government, or more precisely the majority in its legislature, which ignored potential mid- and long-term political and economic impacts of its decisions to amend electoral laws. The resolution of issues like these cannot be achieved through technical and tactical communication in a market environment. It will take consistent, planned efforts to re-build reputations and stakeholder relationships and serious reform that follows significant issues analysis and organisational involvement in public issues debates.

Despite practitioners’ nod to the need to plan professional communication strategically, they often fail to convince senior management of the requirement to address important public policy issues at a level beyond dealing with the mass news media’s demand for immediate responses to a current issue. Public policy issues do not arise like some natural phenomenon. Some issues, of course, are consequences of how organisations should react to crises and natural disasters on their immediate ability to go about their business. But most public policy issues have socio-economic and political implications that are created by changes in an organisation’s external non-market environment—the space where such matters are raised. In this space, described by Habermas (see esp. 1992) as the ‘public sphere,’ those changes occur when issues are debated, elaborated, and resolved. This is a dynamic process in which organisations should be actively involved, just as their opponents and other stakeholders are involved, despite the reluctance of some senior corporate executives to stray too far into commenting in public arenas. The need to participate this way in the non-market environment is the strategic communication imperative.

In facing up to issues before they reach the level of imminent threat to business success, organisations and their spokespeople, or agents, are social and political actors who employ discursive social practices when they engage in dynamic issues debates. Management, communication, structuration, and other sociological theories can help to explain how dynamic issues debates impact on organisations, and how the parameters of those debates change and in turn influence organisations’ responses.

The point in play here is that socio-economic and political issue boundaries are not static. Issues are established as a result of social action by so-called issues definers and change as debate about them takes place. In this process, organisations as social actors define their positions on issues and alter them as more views enter debates about them. Each contribution to an issues debate alters its boundaries, even if by a small margin. In this sense, issues debates are dynamic, and their boundaries change as other social actors participate in a process that seeks resolution through stakeholders reaching consensus. It is in this context that ‘strategic communication’ practice becomes what it is meant to be: forward-focussed professional communication that deals with long-term organisational positioning via a framework from which other communication disciplines find direction.

Thus, strategic communication can be conceptualised as two...