Integrated Corporate Communication: Branding, Globalization & Labor

Introduction: From Segmented to Integrated Corporate Communication

Corporations send out messages constantly — through ads, commercials, websites, quarterly and annual reports, job postings, and memos tacked up on lunchroom bulletin boards. The audiences for these different messages differ from one another, which is one of the major reasons that companies have traditionally not worried about presenting a consistent message across all of these channels. If the memos about how to file an expense report sent out to employees sound nothing like the annual report filed with the SEC, there was historically no reason they should.

However, in recent years companies have been moving increasingly toward what is known as an integrated corporate communication system, so that all messages coming from a company are delivered in the same "language." The purpose of such an approach is to present a unified image of the company's goals and values — one aspect of the broader push in many organizations to promote a coherent brand. This research paper examines the history of this style of corporate communication while asking questions about its effectiveness and, even more importantly, about what this push toward integrated corporate communication reveals about the culture of commerce today.

Traditionally there was a distinct division between the ways in which those at the top of a corporate hierarchy communicated with insiders and outsiders. This makes intuitive sense: employees are different from stockholders, and even more different from people who purchase a company's products or services. Customers and stockholders both need to be persuaded that the company has something worth buying, while employees are concerned with their jobs, their salaries, and how these relate to the company's performance and their own work. In some ways, a company's communication with its employees is like talking to family members, while its communication with potential customers and stockholders is like talking to guests at a dinner party.

In real life, we speak very differently to these two audiences. The fact that companies have also chosen to communicate differently with insiders and outsiders reflects this basic pattern in human communication. In other words, corporate communication traditionally followed the general communication strategies used in other contexts — different dialects for different situations, just as we talk one way to our grandparents and another way to our friends.

The shift to an integrated system of corporate communication can be seen as a violation of this common-sense principle, in which who one is talking to largely determines how one talks. This is not to say there are no good arguments for an integrated corporate communication strategy: such a strategy can be extremely helpful for building a brand and a coherent corporate identity. In an era of ever-increasing globalization, such a strategy might seem — and may well be — vital to a company stretching across the planet. Assessing the effectiveness of integrated communication systems is the core of this research project.

There is, however, another compelling issue: what such an integrated corporate strategy says about larger questions of how corporations function in the twenty-first century. One of the implications of this new form of corporate communication — one that has not been systematically examined — is that corporations speak to their employees in much the same way that they speak to the rest of the world, because employees are no longer seen as part of a corporate family to whom the company owes ongoing loyalty.