Strategic Communication Theory and Practice

The Cocreational Model

Carl H. Botan

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780470674581, 9780470674574
• eBook ISBN: 9781119424888
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Kommunikationswissenschaften

A guide to strategic communication that can be applied across a range of subfields at all three levels—grand strategic, strategic, and tactical communication

Communication is a core function of every human organization so when you work with communication you are working with the very core of the organization. Written for students, academics, and professionals, Strategic Communication Theory and Practice: The Cocreational Model argues for a single unified field of strategic communication based in the three large core subfields of public relations, marketing communication, and health communication, as well as strategic communicators working in many other subfields such as political communication, issues management, crisis communication, risk communication, environmental and science communication, social movements, counter terrorism communication, public diplomacy, public safety and disaster management, and others. Strategic Communication Theory and Practice is built around a cocreational model that shifts the focus from organizational needs and the messages crafted to achieve them, to a publics-centered view placing publics and their ability to cocreate new meanings squarely in the center of strategic communication theory and practice. The author—a noted expert in the field—outlines the theories, campaign strategies, common issues, and cutting edge challenges facing strategic communication, including the role of social media, ethics, and intercultural strategic communication.

As the author explains, the term "strategic communication" properly refers only to the planned campaigns that grow out of research and understanding what publics think and want. This vital resource answers the questions of whether, and how, strategic-level skills can be used across fields, as it:

• Explores the role of theory and the cocreational meta-theory in strategic communication
• Outlines ethical practices and problems in the field
• Includes information on basic campaign strategies
• Offers the most recent information on risk communication, preparedness and terrorism communication, and employment in strategic communication
• Redefines major concepts, such as publics, from a cocreational perspective

Part I
Elements

1
Strategic Communication Concepts

Summary

Strategic communication (SC) is practiced in many fields, including communication, the military sciences, business management and marketing, politics, public health and a host of others. All the fields that practice SC have developed terms, practices and definitions to meet their own needs. The first purpose of this book is to unify the understanding and practice of strategic communication across these subfields. The job of this first chapter, then, is to lay the foundation for doing so by providing an understanding of SC that can be used across all constituent subfields at all three levels of grand strategic, strategic and tactical communication. To do that, this chapter briefly introduces the scope of SC and how this book is organized and then defines grand strategy, strategy and tactics and explains their relationships. With this background, the chapter then defines SC and explains four generic grand strategies, which serve as archetypes of the policy views that guide much SC practice.

Strategic Communication Is Big and Getting Bigger

The first challenge for anyone studying or practicing strategic communication is that the field is growing so fast in both its core employment and at its margins that no one can get a good handle on all the places and ways we practice it. In addition, there is no generally accepted list of all the constituent subfields of SC, although as discussed later what data there is suggests that the largest subfields of SC include public relations (PR), marketing‐advertising‐promotion, and public health education (also sometimes known as social marketing). In the United States, for example, there are separate federal employment statistics available that fit pretty well with these three, which can be called the core subfields because the primary purpose of each is to conduct communication campaigns.

Many other fields have only one or a few members doing SC work per organization where the primary purpose is something other than communication campaigns, so these can be described as secondary or peripheral subfields. These are SC practitioners who might work for units of government, in political campaigns, for charities, for religious organizations, as community advocates, in the armed forces, in corporate communication departments, and in the newly emerging communication industries such as social media, web‐page design and online research, as well as some independent practitioners and consultants and so on. Although the primary purpose of these fields is not communication campaigns, the practitioners who work in them are by no means marginal practitioners and they may or may not outnumber the SC practitioners working in the core subfields of SC. However, there are no separate data collected on these practitioners and as a practical matter they are uncountable today. Then there is the academic field of organizational communication, to which SC owes substantial intellectual and practical debts. Organizational communication is (a) where many SC practitioners, both core and secondary, get their academic training, (b) the historical home of much SC research (see especially the rhetorical organizational communication tradition), and (c) a subject area that does not restrict itself to strategic campaigns, so it is not a core subfield of SC.

Employment in SC

It is very difficult to estimate SC employment in any one country, let alone worldwide. This is largely due to two related issues. First, there appear to be no data published for strategic communication by that name. Second, the enormous SC employment in secondary subfields is not parsed out and reported anywhere. On the other hand, there are some data available for the three core subfields in some countries, such as the United States, that can provide some guidance in understanding SC employment, although the way employment categories are grouped again injects some lack of precision.

In the case of public relations in the United States, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) separates the 240,700 non‐management public relations specialists from the 65,800 public relations and fundraising managers (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2016–17). But then BLS data do not similarly report on non‐management marketing communication specialists at all. Instead they merely report 225,200 “advertising, promotions and marketing managers,” not all of which fit the definition of strategic communicators. These data, in turn, appear to contribute significantly to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (2016–17) overall estimate of 484,640 in “advertising, public relations and related services.” Not included in this figure, however, are all the non‐management jobs in marketing or the 63,000 health educators (social marketers or social marketing), many of which are core SC practitioners. Notably, health communication jobs are expected to grow much faster than PR or advertising, promotions and marketing jobs.

Clearly, adding up all the jobs and job growth in the core and margins of SC would be impossible, but an estimate of SC employment in the three federally reported core subfields in the US alone by 2020 would be in the range of 600,000–750,000. A guesstimate of total SC employment in the US alone by 2020 would be well over a million, suggested in part by the number of job openings in SC today. For example, in August 2015 one internet job site alone listed 149,797 job openings in strategic communication, although some of the listed jobs fell short of what would be called SC in this book (Indeed.com, 2015). The same source listed 64,954 PR jobs, 228,491 jobs in marketing communication and 375,460 jobs in health communication on the same date, although many of these listings clearly overlap, job titles are a bit subjective and, again, not all the jobs listed on this site fit the definition of SC used in this book.

A guesstimate for worldwide SC employment by 2025 might be in the range of 2–2.5 million jobs, with the largest numbers in the US, Europe (France, United Kingdom and Germany leading) and China. This is at best a wild guess, but a quick check of how much SC is discussed on the internet every day can at least hint at the size of the field and maybe at future employment.

SC on the Internet

The number of SC hits found with simple internet searches appears to be in the area of 50–100 million. In 2010, Yahoo alone returned 204,003,168 hits, but with possible changes to their search procedures that number had dropped to only 16,400,000 by late 2015, at a time when Google had 36,900,000 and Bing 11,700,000. Many but not all of these are clearly duplicates, but since it would take the reader years just to visit this many sites, with no time for downloading or reading to confirm their content, gross estimates will have to do.

SC’s rate of growth in the scholarly arena is also impressive. For example, Google Scholar listed 2,700,000 academic‐related SC publications by late 2015, more than double the 1,220,000 of 2010. A 2010 search for SC in the most used scholarly database in just the Communication field (ComAbstracts) returned 369 journal articles, a number that grew to 690 by mid‐2012, while ProQuest listed 27,597 documents. A search for SC in the largest scholarly database in management sciences returned only 1,355 sources in 2010 but 3,534 in 2012. SC is growing at a tremendous rate but it is probably not doubling every two years, so these data again suggest that search protocols may have changed. In addition, in the same era, military periodicals as a group contain 11,777 articles on SC, and the ISI Web of Knowledge lists 1,428 books and journal articles. The Science Direct database offers 590 sources, EBSCO Host lists 2,421 sources and, finally, Dissertation Abstracts International lists 1,180 PhD dissertations since 1861 that address SC in some way.

Organization and Goal of This Book

This book is made up of 10 chapters divided into three parts. The first part, “Elements,” addresses the basic concepts and components of SC in four chapters: (1) SC as a field, the roles of grand strategy, strategy and tactics and basic grand strategies; (2) the relationship of theory and practice, and an explanation of the cocreational metatheory and the cocreational molecule; (3) the centrality of stakeholders, customers, markets, audiences and publics and how these differ from each other, as well as how publics form and function. Finally, Chapter 4 addresses ethics in SC and related subfields, as well as ethical pledges for practitioners and organizations.

The second part, “Strategies,” covers strategic implications and issues in three chapters: (5) issues and issues management, including crises; (6) deriving basic campaign strategies and tactics from theory; and (7) a cocreational view of SC in risk and preparedness situations.

The third part, “New Challenges,” offers a cocreational perspective on new and expanding challenges in SC, also in three chapters, including (8) social media and other new information technologies in SC; (9) a cocreational view of international and intercultural SC, including public diplomacy; and (10) terrorist and counterterrorist SC from the cocreational view.

Note that this book does not contain a separate chapter on research in spite of its central role in all strategic communication, and particularly in any cocreational approach. Covering research in SC could take up a whole book if done properly, so there is no way a single chapter could do the subject justice. There are also numerous research methods texts and guides in several SC subfields. Two non‐objective recommendations would be Investigating Communication by Frey, Botan and Kreps (2000), which is a basic text on research methods, and Interpreting Communication Research by Frey, Botan, Friedman and Kreps (1992), which is a case study approach to research methods.

The goal of this book is to use the best that each subfield of SC has to offer and combine those into a single comprehensive publics‐centered view intended to be useful to those practicing, researching or teaching in all the subfields of SC. In other words, one goal of this book is to answer the question: How can a field like marketing or charity fundraising help improve the practice of SC in political campaigning or public diplomacy? The question is not whether simple tactical skills can be useful across subfields—many can and several good writing books address this tactical level, including Kent (2010), Meeske (2008), Newsom and Haynes (2010), and Rich (2009). The real issue is whether, and how, strategic‐level skills can be used across fields.

The next two sections of this chapter help lay a foundation for defining SC from a cocreational perspective by discussing how communication can be constitutive of organ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Foreword
• Overview of the Book
• Part I: Elements
• Part II: Strategies
• Part III: New Challenges
• References and Further Reading
• Index
• End User License Agreement