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.

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References:

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

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