What is corporate communication, and what is it for?

Try this. Open a company’s website. Then read one of its job ads. Then watch its CEO speak on a panel. If the three sound like they come from three different organisations, that company either has no corporate communication or nobody is looking after it.

Corporate communication is the work of telling, in one consistent voice, who an organisation is, what it does and why it does it. That story has more than one audience. Employees, customers, investors, journalists, regulators, partners, even the neighbourhood the organisation sits in. Each of them walks in through a different door. Corporate communication makes sure that whichever door they use, they find the same organisation inside.

How is it different from PR and marketing?

The three get mixed up all the time, and it’s easy to see why. They use the same tools: press releases, events, social media, interviews. The difference is in what each one is after.

Marketing tries to sell a product or a service. Its audience is the customer and its yardstick is sales. Public relations looks after how visible the organisation is in public; press, events and campaigns are its ground. Corporate communication works a level above both. It looks for coherence across everything the organisation says, and it protects reputation over the long run.

When a company launches a new product, marketing runs the ads. PR announces the launch to the press. Corporate communication asks different questions. Does this product fit who we are? What will the CEO say at the launch? Will our own people read about it in the paper, or hear it from us first?

What does it cover?

It varies from one organisation to the next, but the core is roughly the same:

Leadership communication: When, where and what the people at the top say. Speeches, statements, interviews.
Internal communication: Where, from whom and when employees find out what’s going on.
Media relations: A steady relationship with journalists, built on trust.
Corporate identity: How the organisation looks and how it sounds, from the logo to the tone of an email.
Content and digital channels: The website, social media accounts, corporate publications.
Stakeholder relations: Public bodies, civil society, partners, alumni.
Sponsorship and social responsibility: The work that shows what the organisation stands behind.
Difficult moments: Bad news, an unexpected turn of events, a mistake.

Every message is a record of a decision

It’s common to treat corporate communication as packaging. A decision is made, a text is written, and the communication team announces it “in nice words”. But how an appointment is announced, who delivers bad news, whether a mistake is owned or not — none of that is a writing problem. It’s a leadership problem.

That’s why corporate communication sits close to the top. Not at the end of a decision, but at the table where it’s made. When “How are we going to explain this?” is asked while the decision is still being made, the decision itself often changes.

When does an organisation need it?

Most organisations notice the gap when something goes wrong. An unexpected story appears in the press. Employees learn about a major change from outside. Three managers give three different answers to the same question. The signs usually show up much earlier, though:

The organisation is growing and people no longer know each other.
The leadership has changed, or a new chapter is starting.
The website, social media and brochures sound like separate organisations.
Nobody has heard about the good work the organisation does.
An investment, a merger or a restructuring is on the horizon.

What does good corporate communication look like?

Most of the time, you barely notice it. The organisation sounds like itself everywhere. Employees hear the news from inside first. Leaders aren’t caught off guard by a hard question. There’s no gap between what is said about the organisation and what it actually does.

Organisations are read not by what they say, but by what they do while saying it. Corporate communication is the work of closing the distance between the two.

Anyone can write the text. Making the organisation live up to it is another job altogether.