Investor Relations

Summary

Investor Relations is a strategic management responsibility that integrates finance, communication, marketing and securities law compliance to enable the most effective two-way communication between a company, the financial community, and other constituencies, which ultimately contributes to a company's securities achieving fair valuation. The term describes the department of a company devoted to handling inquiries from shareholders and investors, as well as others who might be interested in a company's stock or financial stability.

Investor relations professionals therefore need to link communications to a company’s strategy and “vision” as frequently as possible. Increasingly, the investor relations function is getting involved in actives traditionally handled by PR and media relations professionals and communicating with many of the same constituencies. In addition to a solid understanding of finance, then, IR professionals also need strong communication skills.

How do companies attract and retain investors? First they need to have a framework for managing investor relations. The following section addresses the key objectives of investor relations and also provides a framework for implementation of a successful IR program:

• Explain the company's vision, strategy, and potential to investors and "conduit constituencies" such as analysts and the media: they need to get messages about company results and potential future results across as understandably as possible to the investing public.
• Ensure that expectations of the company's stock price are appropriate for its earnings prospects, the industry outlook, and the economy: IROs need to understand investor concerns and expectations for their organizations and relay this information to management.
• Reduce stock price volatility: It is critical for a company to have strong IR capabilities to maintaining a stable stock price and shareholder base. Also, IROs often have to respond to market news or events that have the potential to affect stock price negatively in the short term.

There are two types of investors—investors (individual share holders) and institutional investors (pension funds, mutual funds, insurance companies, endowment funds, and bank). Because different demands on the IR department require the use of different communication channels, therefore, a company's should address both investors by using different IR strategy.

• Institutional Investors: they have larger holding than individuals and trade more actively, and thus they can have a greater effect on stock price volatility. For instance, institutions can be broken down into groups based on portfolio turnover (high, moderate, and low) as well as investment styles (e.g. growth, value, income, and index)
• Individual Investors: compared to institutions, they have smaller account sizes and generate lower trading volume. They may own stock directly, or through mutual funds, company stock plans, or 401(k) plans.

About intermediaries, in particular, the media and the analyst community are the key conduits. Companies provide information to intermediaries through conference calls highlighting quarterly achievements, press conferences announcing annual financial results, and face-to-face meetings to discuss company developments and strategy.

• The Media: media coverage of business can have a dramatic effect on a company's stock price. Having a strong media relations function coordinated with the IR department will be beneficial to a firm’s investor relations effort by maximizing access to media outlets and ensuring consistency in the messages each group sends to the media.
• Sell-Side Analysts: buy-side analysts typically work for money management firms and research companies for their own institutions' investment portfolios. Sell-side analysts cover stocks within certain industries and generate detailed research repots that offer “buy,” “sell,” or “hold” recommendations.
• Rating Agencies: these agencies analyze companies in much the same way that buy-side and sell-side analysts do, but with a specific focus on their creditworthiness. They make their ratings available to the public through their ratings information desks and published reports; AAA, Aaa, BBB, Baa and the lowest are D and C, representing companies that are in default of existing loan agreements.

*************************************************************************************

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investor_relations

Changing Environment of Business

Summary

The relation between a business environment and an organization is one of the issues of organizational management. If you want to understand the relation between a business environment and an organization, first you should understand the organization as deeply as you can. A business environment is the main factor during making decisions of an organization’s policies and strategies, and is also the target of organizational management; this is because a good business environment can accomplish a good way of management. Usually the reason for a failed company is because the company served the relation between the business environment and the organization.

Because the business environment is constantly changing, everyone in business today needs to communicate strategically. Therefore, how to compete in changing environments and how managers can adapt to the challenges of business environments have become big issues for organizations.

• Recognize the changing environment—first the managers need to understand the business environment is constantly evolving. So, they need to look at the big picture of how the changing environment affects the company’s image in order to prevent the damaging results from happening in the future.

• Adapt to the environment without compromising principles—companies must adapt to the changing environment without changing what they stand for or compromising their principles, and to react in a timely fashion to whatever news they receive. In short, they need to continue learning and adapting.

• Don't assume problems will magically disappear—they will only get worse and you will be better off in today's complex environment if you think problems will magically disappear. Consumers have longer memories than you think, especially with bad news, as witnessed by boycotts of companies such as Nike, Coors, Shell, Texaco, and Wal-Mart.

• Keep corporate communication connected to strategy—corporate communication must be closely linked to a company's overall strategy and vision. Successful companies connect communication with strategy through structure, such as having the head of corporate communication report directly to the CEO.

Example and Self-Experience

This video talks about the business environment.


Today, the business environments are changing into a new type—e-business—almost every shop now moves toward virtual, which means online stores. John Barbour, CEO of Toysrus.com, commented on the challenges of competing in an e-business environment, “We learned that you need to have a very robust infrastructure to handle this business and the scale of it. One of the things people don't realize is that most of these Internet businesses, including ourselves, have to grow infrastructure at a dramatic rate. Companies are increasing tenfold within a space of a year, two years. And that's incredibly tough to manage, no matter who you are.”

Also, the manager's leadership could effect the business environment a lot. When I worked in the pharmacy, some of employees didn't like my manager because of her leadership. So, sometimes a simple problem would become difficult to solve, or the communication barrier would appear between the employee and the manager.

*************************************************************************************

References:

http://www.globrand.com/2007/04/05/20070405-9422-1.shtml

http://www.healthdirections.org/openspace.htm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IThdNheGZkI

http://www-07.ibm.com/innovation/includes/pdf/ngdotcoms.pdf

Communicating Strategically

Summary

Communication does not just happen. It must be organized, developed, and built. The first step in the process is to define a communications strategy.
A good communications strategy allows you to exercise better control over your work and to frame the issues in a perspective other than research. A communications strategy removes doubt, emphasizes planning, and involves all the project participants in raising the visibility of the research.
Defining the communications strategy is a task that is best carried out as a group. In addition to pooling expertise, a group approach has the even more important advantage of building on interactions between the participants.
Even a small-scale communications strategy will facilitate your work. After all, a small-scale plan is better than no plan at all and you may be able to develop and perfect it as you go along.

Below, there are three parts about developing an effective corporate communication strategy:

Setting an effective organization strategy

• Determining objectives—managerial communication is only successful if you get the desired response from you audience, and you need to think about the communication which include setting measurable objectives for it. And the basis for defining an objective is: "What does the organization want each constituency to do as a result of the communication?"
• Deciding what resources are available—money, human resources, and time
• Diagnosing the organization's reputation—reputation is based on the constituency's perception of the organization rather than the reality of the organization itself. Sometimes, a damaged reputation can result from circumstances beyond an organization’s control.

Analyzing constituencies

• Who are your organization's constituencies?—in an organizations, it includes primary group of constituencies and secondary group of constituencies. Employees, customers, shareholders, and communities are in the primary group; media, suppliers, government, and creditors are in the secondary group.
• What is the constituency's attitude toward the organization?—it’s means what each constituency thinks about the organization itself.
• What does the constituency know about the topic?—it is critical to make sure that employees know about the topic, and how they feel about it.

Delivering message appropriately

• Choose a communication channel—each time a corporate communication strategy is developed, the question of which channels to use and when to use them should be explored carefully. But before this step, the company should think about the structures and the contents of the message.
• Structure message carefully—there are two effective message structures: direct structure, which means revealing your main point first, then explaining why; indirect structure, which means explaining why first, then revealing your main point. Normally, organization should use direct communication because indirect communication is confusing and harder to understand.

Example and Self-Experience

One example is the way that Nissan introduced the Infiniti series cars in the United States. They showed the cars in an indirect way by creating a mood without actually showing the car; it is because they wanted to show their strong identity through this kind of advertising. In comparsion, their competitor Toyota's Lexus showed the traditional pictures of cars. But actually, the result was not good; Nissan didn't sell many cars during that campaign. They should have designed the message structure more carefully and catered to American consumers' preferences more.

I think the prerequisite of doing good, strategic communication is to realize the main topic or the problem that we need to talk about. Otherwise, it could be meaningless, even though the person has the ability of good communication skills.

*************************************************************************************

References:

http://www.idrc.ca/uploads/user-S/11606746331Sheet01_CommStrategy.pdf

http://www.total-velocity.com/services/serv_comm.html

Communication Technologies

Summary

Social media can take many different forms, including Internet forums, message boards, weblogs, wikis, podcasts, pictures and video. Examples of social media applications are Google Groups (reference, social networking), Wikipedia (reference), MySpace (social networking), Facebook (social networking), YouTube (social networking and video sharing), Twitter (social networking and microblogging) and so on. Many of these social media services can be integrated via social network aggregation platforms like Mybloglog and Plaxo.

Liveworld Builds And Moderates Social Media Networks For Marketers


Ebay, Intuit, Campbell Soup and Mini Cooper all are using social media to help drive their marketing. This video talks about how mapping communities to brands and moderating the conversations these brands are having are driving connections marketers never before believed could happen, and LIVEWORLD’s best practices using social media.

Does technology effect on communications in the enterprise? Actually it does. As communication and information travels faster and faster, barriers of distance disappear, the world seems smaller and smaller, and this has large implications for the way we conduct business. Storing important in files on a computer rather than in drawers, for instance, has made information easily accessible. Using e-mail allows businesses to communicate and send these files quickly to remote locations outside of an office.

Here are two videos— “Paper vs. Electronic,” introduce by a fun way of how to use new technology available within the organization.

• Paper vs. Electronic – Movie 1
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYviTwQ_NtI

• Paper vs. Electronic – Movie 2
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0cIST2JrkE&feature=related

Blogs are the most powerful development in the information world since the internet was presented to the public, and it certainly affects every industry. In other words, blogs are not a “selection” but an “important condition” for operating an organization. In the past, enterprises got used to controlling its information, but now, they are losing the power of control. And the power can’t be taken back, at least not all of it.

Example and Self-Experience

Does a social media network really effect an enterprise?There is an example in a BusinessWeek magazine that said a young program designer, called Mark Jen, worked for Google; because he complained about the company’s Medical and health care plan and free food in his blog, he was fired unexpectedly. He became famous because of this reason, and many bloggers root for him and criticize Google’s excessive reaction. After that, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo and other companies invited him to be their employee; finally, he chose Plaxo to work for. His job is to assist Plaxo with developing their blog.

Another example is about General Motors, which is the first company to use blogs as a tool of communication, sometimes they use blogs to communicate with the community directly, but they ignore their public relations department and major news media.

Compared to the study environments, I feel the differences of communication between now and my junior high life; now we send papers to professors by using online systems and chat with friends through Windows Live Messenger; but, ten years ago, I only could save a file on a floppy disk and chat with friends by telephone.

*************************************************************************************

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media

http://communication.howstuffworks.com/technology-changed-business.htm

http://blog.sina.com.tw/2204/article.php?pbgid=2204&entryid=13756

http://www.podtech.net/home/3467/liveworld-builds-and-moderates-social-media-networks-for-marketers

http://www.arkenis.com/

Corporate Communication Relevance

Summary

Relevance is not limited to strictly traditional sales/client communications. In a corporate environment, there are literally hundreds of applications for the distribution of information through documents, both internally—to various departments, employees, and management, as well as externally—to clients, prospects, suppliers, investors, and government.

For a business to run efficiently, good lines of communication must be established between management and staff, from top to bottom, as well as suppliers, investors and even customers. Corporate communications are an important consideration in change management and corporate governance. Corporate communication defined as communication which goes to all staff, it serves as the liaison between an organization and its publics. In general, corporate communication includes:

External Communications

• Media Relations: This involves building and maintaining a positive relationship with the media (TV, print, web etc. Be it drafting and dissemination of press releases, organizing press conferences and meeting with media professionals, events for media etc.
• External event: could involve vendor / supplier / distributor meets, channel partner meetings, events related to product launches, important initiatives etc.
• Company / spokesperson profiling: Ensuring that the company / organization spokesperson is in the public limelight, is well-known and considered as an authority for the respective sector / field.
• Management of company internet/ web portals /other external touch points
• Managing company publication - for the external world

Internal Communications

• Managing company publication - for employees and partners
• Internal events / announcements - for employees and partners
• Employee communications - sharing information with employees, building employer pride, managing employee issues etc
• Manage intranet and other internal web portals

Brand Management

• Develop and upkeep the corporate identity—ensure adherences to corporate brand guidelines

Crisis Communication

• Manage crisis situations through effective communication

Corporate communications will become more and more important to organizations, and new communication tool will come out in order to follow the trends of technologies in the future. Also, because of the internationalization of business, there are more chances to work with the people in different culture. Therefore, organizations need to create a new plan of communication strategy which related to the new technologies, new cultures, and new trends, also need to adapt the changes to increase their competition.

Example and Self-Experience

Since business goes globally these years, having the ability to communicate with other countries' people is very important. But, I think everybody doesn't know the importance of gestures during communication. Therefore, here is a useful example of gestures in different countries.



By doing the intercultural project of IBM Germany, I found out some specific communication ways which we need to be aware of when we have communication with German, such as the gesture of three fingers extended to form a “W” is a neo-Nazi symbol that is strictly forbidden, and “Small talk” with strangers does not have a significant social function.

*************************************************************************************

References:

http://www.relevantcommunications.com/whyrelevance/relevanceinuse.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_communications

http://www.thinkingmanagers.com/business-management/corporate-communication.php

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdsRnPRznmQ

Media Relations

Summary

Media means of communication, as radio and television, newspapers, and magazines, which reach or influence people widely. In the different types of media, the news media effect an organization the most. Media is a tool of deliver a company’s information and images to the community and constituency. And since the media are interested in satisfying the needs of readers and viewers—but usually they are more interested in bad news such as scandals, so how to build better relationships with members of the media and cultivate relationships with the right people in the media are very important.

There are some strategies about how to build good relationships, successful media relations program, and the online media strategy:

Building better relations with the media:

• Conducting research for targeting media—first, determine what objectives they have for certain story and search for the right place to pitch the story. Second, find out who covers their industry and the company specifically. Third, figure out who is covering a company’s beat, the firm’s corporate communication team needs to determine what kind of a reporter they are dealing with.
• Responding to media calls—it is very important because the responding can make a powerful difference in how the company appears in the story. The person who responds for the call, the tone of conversation should be friendly, communicate honestly, and try to get as much information as possible while being careful not to give in return any information that is not already public knowledge.
• Preparing for media interviews—here has some tips when preparing for a media interview: keep answers short; avoid saying "no comment"; listen carefully to each question; use "bridging" to move the interviewer from his/her question to your communication objective; use anecdotes, analogies, and simple statistics to make your point; and keep your body language in mind throughout the interview.
• Gauging success—the organization should indicate whether it is achieving its communication objectives by records the hit, looking where the ink has landed and how well the company’s key messages are communicate. Then they can highlight the actual corporate value created by communications activities.
• Maintaining ongoing relationships—organizations need to maintain the good relationship with the right journalists for their specific industry because they could build goodwill and credibility of the company.

Create a successful media relations program:

• Involve media relations personnel in strategy
• Develop in-house capabilities
• Use outside counsel sparingly

Develop an online media strategy:

• Extend media relations strategy to the blogospher
• Handle negative news effectively

Example and Self-Experience

Here is a video about media relations strategies.

An example of media relations, which we already read in the text book, is the Adolph Coors Company. They faced a big problem because of a nationwide boycott; since they didn’t have good relations with the media, they had a difficult time during the boycott.

The university I studied at in Taiwan has a good relationship with the news media. Therefore, on almost every occasion, I could see a big section of news reports about my university in the newspapers.

*************************************************************************************

References:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HEzoivI3Cc

http://elissafairchild.blogspot.com/2008/02/never-pick-fight-with-man-who-buys-his.html

21st Century Organizational Trends

Summary

There are five keys which Stephen P. Borgatti identifies for the 21st century organizational trends:

• Globalization: nowadays organizations want to extend their business to other or all parts of the globe to increase more chances of sales and demand. Therefore, globalization could help organizations enhance their competition and encourage competitive attitudes of employees in the workplace. On the other hand, it can also reduce costs and improve the quality of international transportation and communication, search for unsaturated markets, and exploit regional costs and differences in expertise.

• Diversity: because of the internationalization of business, the workforce is getting more heterogeneous sexually, racially, culturally, and individually in the 21st century; the conflict and communication problems in an organization have become more complicated than before. Therefore, both organizations and employees need to possess intercultural competence to cope with different styles of interaction.

• Flexible: today, a lot of consumers want customized products, so organizations have to find a way to satisfy each customer’s needs individually. Therefore, they need to increase diversity in the workplace, increase the pace of change in technology and markets, and increase the job ability of employees.

• Flat: the structure of organizations is now becoming flatter than before. They change their organization’s structure into fewer levels of management and more empowered employees in order to make decisions quickly. They need to handle complex environments to follow the trend and satisfy customers’ needs. Consequently, the result of flat structures increase more face to face interaction and much better interaction chances among colleagues.

• Networked: because the technologies developed very fast and well, the networked organizations can have more benefits than the organizations that are not networked. They can save more time because network systems could cross unit and firm boundaries, ignoring chains of command, directly communicating with each unit; sharing information more quickly by the open computer system; increasing opportunities of outsourcing and downsizing; timely decentralizing responses to different needs in different countries…etc.

Here is a diagram linking up all the concepts above.
(Click image for larger version)
















(The dashed arrows with blue heads mean "creates the need for", while the solid arrows with black heads mean "causes" or "enables".)

Example and Self-Experience

Here is an example of the changing structure of organizations: The film industry may stand as an early adopter of new organizational forms. During the studio era of the 1920s through 1940s, for example, the industry was organized much like the vertically-integrated, mass production enterprises established in the manufacturing sector during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. With the decline of the studios in the 1950s, however, came the arrival of a new system, in which the large entertainment conglomerates' role was reduced to finance and distribution, and responsibility for production shifted to a number of small firms organized on an ad hoc basis. On large projects in the film industry today, hundreds or even thousands of individuals and small entities each contribute their part to the completion of a multi-million dollar production. During the post-studio period, the power of the talent agencies, which played an important role as deal brokers, increased significantly. With the recent growth in the number and importance of films produced independently with private capital, and the fragmentation of the distribution system to accommodate this new type of picture, the industry may be entering yet another new stage.

I think the best example of 21st century trends is the environment that I study in here; the time is flexible, and I can work with people from different countries in the class; it is good to have more private time and a chance to experience different cultures' characteristics and manners.

*************************************************************************************

References:

http://www.professorcezar.adm.br/Textos/21st%20Century%20Organizational%20Trends.pdf

http://ccs.mit.edu/21c/21CWP001.html

Crisis Communications

Summary

What is crisis? Crisis is a condition of instability or danger, as in social, economic, political, or international affairs, leading to a decisive change. The crises in an organization include tangible devastation, such as the destruction of lives or assets, or intangible devastation, such as the loss of an organization’s credibility or reputation damage. These crises which caused by human error, negligence, or some times, malicious intent, could have prevented in the first place. Therefore, how to correctly and quickly dealing crises by using crisis communication is very important. Organizations should have a detailed communication plan for crisis in order to retain their reputation in time.

There are six main points of preparations which need to be prepared ahead of crises:

• Assess the risk for the organization
• Set communication objectives for potential crises
• Analyze channel choice
• Assign a different team to each crisis
• Plan for centralization
• What to include in a formal plan

Every crisis is different; below there are eight steps of suggestions for communicating during the crisis:

• Step 1-Get control of the situation: The first step is to get control of the situation as soon as possible. Everyone in the organization should to know who need to contacted, but unfortunately, this is often unrealistic for large organizations.
• Step 2-Gather as much information as possible: As information becomes available, someone should be assigned on gathering this information. It is because the company spokesperson should communicate with media and constituencies right away, or the crisis will expend very quickly.
• Step 3-Set up a centralized crisis management center: A crisis center should be created at the same time of gathering information, and provide a comfortable location for media to use during the crisis.
• Step 4-Communicate early and often: The company should communicate early and often in order to reduce the damages which caused by the crisis.
• Step 5-Understand the media’s mission in a crisis: Because all the members of media want to get the story first than other competitors, organizations should use this advantage presenting positive to the media.
• Step 6-Communicate directly with affected constituencies: using media to get information out is good, but the organization should also communicate with constituencies directly and consider the contact order of constituencies.
• Step 7-Remember that business must continue: Organizations must continue their business even a crisis exists. Managers need to think through other questions related to the ongoing business.
• Step 8-Make plans to avoid another crisis immediately: Organizations should develop a plan as soon as possible after a crisis is solved by the lesson they learn from the crisis therefore to avoid similar issues in the future.

Example and Self-Experience

This video talks about the steps one should take in communicating to the public during a crisis.

A "classic" crisis communication event can be found in the "Tylenol scare" of the early 1980s, when drug manufacturer Johnson & Johnson announced that some of its pain relief capsules had been laced with cyanide. The company immediately put in place a plan to protect its customers, remove its product from store shelves, investigate the problem, deal with the media, and protect its corporate reputation in the market place and with the American public.

During my part-time job in the pharmacy, one of the cosmetic products was found to include an illegal ingredient, a large number of consumers wanted to return the product and asked us for a quick solution, which caused big trouble for us. Fortunately, the cosmetics company came to the press conference and explained the whole thing the next day, which disencumbered this disorderly circumstance.

*************************************************************************************

References:

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,695219642,00.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbC2clUC0ss

http://ohioline.osu.edu/~hcrd/agcomm/crisis2.html

Internal Communications

Summary

Nowadays, the internal communications become different than before, the managers more focus on “employee care” than “customer care”. Today’s employee is a different person in terms of values and needs than earlier decades; they are well educated, have higher expectations, and want to know more about the company they work for. Also the workplace is different today—tighter staffing, longer hours, greater workloads and more emphasize on performance. Therefore, strong internal communication will play a pivotal role for increased employees’ workforce loyalty and productivity.

Internal communications means all communication within an organization—it can be oral or written, face to face or virtual, one-on-one or in a small group. Good internal communication can help organization to establish formal roles and responsibilities for employees. But what is the good internal communication? There are some features of good internal communication below:

• Transparent and timely
• Clear
• Concise
• Informative
• Openness
• Honesty
• Two-way communication

Since the technologies developed very well, so the ways of communication with employees become more and more, such as e-mail, intranets, blog, and satellite meetings connecting distant office. But the most important thing and factor of the internal communication is—the managers who has a basic responsibility to listen to what his or her employees say and get to know who they really are as individuals.

Example and Self-Experience

This video is about the communicator John Robataille speaks on effective communications in business and management.

Some companies, uncomfortable with the openness of public blogs, use them as an internal communications tool. Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, the German investment bank, has set up about 120 internal blogs to promote discussion and distribute information, including some that encourage users to share ideas, requests and criticisms of in-house information technology systems. All employees are free to contribute to the blogs, and the chief information officer in the bank estimates that there are several thousand active users in the company.

In fact, I found out the chain pharmacy which I worked in also has the same communication policy as the investment bank in Germany. But, they only opened one blog which could be used by employees to check the newest policies and news, which was published by the main company. Also, they could see the ranking of each store within specific categories. Even though they have only one blog, it still has a good effect as an internal communication tool.

*************************************************************************************

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_communications

http://www.stepupcommunications.com/Services/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CECiY_lRQ84

http://nevon.typepad.com/nevon/2004/12/ft_highlights_e.html

Corporate Advertising

Summary

Corporate advertising is the advertising that is more public relations than sales promotion. Its objective is to build a firm's corporate image, reputation, and name-awareness among the general public or within an industry. Corporate advertising also can be defined as paid use of media that seeks to benefit the image of the corporation rather than its products or services alone.

There are three different categories of corporate advertising,

• Image advertising: its purpose is to reinforce identity or enhance reputation. Also, it is an efficient mechanism for changing impressions about organizations, and allows companies to differentiate themselves from rivals.
• Financial advertising: this advertising is use for enhance the image in financial community of the company. It can stimulate interest in a company’s stock among potential investors as well as buy-side and sell-side analysts; also it can create a chance to increase the price of a company’s stock.
• Issue or advocacy advertising: It is used by companies to respond to external threats from either government or special interest groups, or deal with controversial subjects.

Corporate advertising helps companies communicate their message to a wide audience quickly and efficiently, however, the cost of advertising is very high. There are three reason of why use corporate advertising:

• Increase sales:
• Create a stronger reputation
• Recruit and retain employees

Example and Self-Experience

Below, there are two company's corporate advertisings.

Microsoft Corporate Advertising

Toyota Corporate Advertising

For an example, General Motors's recent corporate advertising positions the company as concerned with quality. Among consumers who believe a particular GM brand, such as Oldsmobile, has "high quality," retrieval of GM's corporate ad knowledge may transfer to the brand belief and thus strengthen it in memory. Consequently, the brand belief would become easier to retrieve and consumers would have more confidence in it (Wyer and Srull 1989).

During the time I worked in the pharmacy, the assistant manager told me that the image of this pharmacy used to be average. But, since the main company started to promote the images of professionalism, friendliness, and reliability to the community, the sales increased rapidly and extension went smoothly.

*************************************************************************************

References:

http://www.youtube.com/v/W3lHbVSL_84&hl=en

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4vby8L5YoY

http://www.workerbees.com/2007/06/different-twist-on-old-merger-ad.html

http://www.allbusiness.com/marketing-advertising/706116-1.html

Image, Identity, and Reputation

Summary

The image, identity and reputation are the most critical communication function in a company. They cannot be built in one day; a company needs to work hard to build them.

A company’s identity is the visual manifestation of the company’s reality as conveyed through the organization’s name, logo, motto, products, services, buildings, stationery, uniforms, and all other tangible pieces of evidence created by the organization and communicated to a variety of constituencies.

Image is a reflection of an organization’s identity, or we can say, it is the organization as seen from the viewpoint of its constituencies. Depending on which constituency is involved, an organization can have many different images.

Reputation is the estimation in which an organization is held; as distinct from Image, it is the process and the effect of transmission of a target image. To be more precise, we call reputation transmission a communication of an evaluation without the specification of the evaluator, if not for a group attribution, and only in the default sense discussed before.


Example and Self-Experience

For example, a chemical company such as Dow that has the image of being environmentally unfriendly will not be successful selling products; therefore, they started trying to position as "green". A company in such a situation should either: withdraw from the "green market", invest in promotional activities that will recast their corporate image in a greener hue, and/or follow a more environmentally friendly path. A good overall corporate image can be seen as the sum of all the images associated with the firm's individual product positions.

About the logo, I recall the processes of designing the badge logo when I was in high school; I was asked to design the badge, which was my high school's graduation souvenir. I spent a whole week using a graphics editing program and finally caught up to the deadline. From that time, I realized it is very difficult to design conspicuous and meaningful logos.

*************************************************************************************

References:

http://custombusinesslogos.com/eps_vector_sign_logos.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reputation#Reputation

Communication Theories

Summary

The definition of communication is: the process of transferring information from a sender to a receiver with the use of a medium in which the communicated information is understood by both sender and receiver. It is a process of exchange information by a common language which using several methods.

Communications theory is the theory that is devoted to the probabilistic characteristics of the transmission of data in the presence of noise, and that is used to advance the design, development, and operation of communications systems. Formal communication theory (rhetorical theory) goes back 2500 years ago to Classical Greece when Plato, Aristotle, and the Sophists were speech teachers. The Greek tradition was continued and improved upon by the Romans, after which it remained static until the twentieth century. Indeed, Classical Rhetoric was and still is being taught today. However, as a result of the proliferation of mass communications via radio, movies, and television, and of empirical scientific methods, communication theory changed in the latter part of the twentieth century. Actually, the main impetus was the need for propaganda techniques and to persuade troops to fight during World War I and World War II.

There are three theorists of communication and the important thoughts illustrated by each model:

• Aristotle: The receiver holds the key to success.
• Lasswell: An effect must be achieved if communication takes place.
• Shannon and Weaver: Semantic noise can be a major communication barrier.
• Schramm: Overlapping experiences makes it easier to communicate successfully.
• The Rileys: Membership in primary groups affects how messages are sent and received.
• Berlo: Several important factors must be considered relating to source, message, channel, receiver.

Example and Self-Experience

Below, it is an interesting movie about The Future of communication.

A classic example of using the wrong channel is that of research conducted by an American newspaper on the eve of the Presidential elections in the 1940's. The message was simple: Who will you vote for? The audience was easy to define: a random sample of voters. The newspaper duly conducted a telephone poll of voters chosen at random from the phone book and announced that the Republicans would win. In fact the Democrats won with a massive victory. The reason they got it wrong was quite simple: at that time only the wealthier members of society would have telephones and the wealthier members of society would vote Republican.

I had an experience with semantic noise before. That happened to me the second day of my first part-time job in the pharmacy; I talked to a customer who asked for help because there was nobody who could come to help her. Since I was not fluent in the customer’s language, the customer got angry with me and complained to my manager in the end.

*************************************************************************************

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication:

http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~rbrokaw/commtheory.html

http://extension.missouri.edu/xplor/comm/cm0109.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iu0ztxdsFis
http://dennis2themax.blogspot.com/2008/01/definitions-of-communication.html
http://www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk/MUHome/cshtml/introductory/lasswell.html