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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
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
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
List of Figures and Tables
Foreword
Overview of the Book
Part I: Elements
Part II: Strategies
Part III: New Challenges
Part I: Elements
1 Strategic Communication Concepts
Summary
Strategic Communication Is Big and Getting Bigger
Organization and Goal of This Book
Grand Strategy, Strategy and Tactics
2 Theory in SC and the Cocreational Metatheory
Summary
Introduction
Theory and Practice
Schools of Thought, Metatheory and Paradigms in SC
Cocreational Metatheory in SC
Cocreational Molecule and Model
3 Stakeholders, Publics, Customers, Markets and Audiences
Summary
Introduction
Different Ways Subfields of SC Think about the Groups We Communicate With
Segmentation and Functions of Publics
Process in Publics
4 Strategic Communication Ethics
Summary
Introduction
Current Ethical Thought in SC and Its Subfields
Cocreational Approach to Ethics
Application of Cocreational Ethics
Part II: Strategies
5 Issues, Issues Management and Crises
Summary
Introduction and History
Issues and Problems
Life Cycle of an Issue
Stages of an Issue
Conclusion
6 Basic Theories of Strategic Communication
Summary
Introduction
Coorientation Theory
Sense‐Making Theory
Attribution Theory
Trust
Persuading versus Informing
7 Risk and Preparedness Communication
Summary
Introduction
The Cocreational View of Risk Communication
Traditional Risk and Disaster Preparedness Communication
Conclusion
Part III: New Challenges
8 Social Media and New Information Technology
Summary
Introduction
Interconnected Publics and the Cocreation of Meaning
Key Attributes of New Media
Success Rates of SC Campaigns
The Free Lunch and the Changing of the Guard
Chapter 9: International and Intercultural Strategic Communication
Summary
Cocreational View of International and Intercultural Strategic Communication
Planning, Evaluation and Ethics in Intercultural SC Campaigns
Conclusion
10 Strategic Communication in Terrorism and Counterterrorism
Summary
Introduction
Terrorism as Strategic Communication
Counterterrorism Strategic Communication
Conclusion
References and Further Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 01
Table 1 Grand strategies
List of Illustrations
Chapter 01
Figure 1 Strategic information defined
Figure 2 Strategic communication defined
Figure 3 Grand strategy defined
Figure 4 Strategy defined
Figure 5 Tactics defined
Figure 6 Tactics–strategy continuum
Chapter 02
Figure 7 Formal–informal theory continuum
Figure 8 Cocreational continuum
Figure 9 Cocreational molecule
Chapter 03
Figure 10 Cocreational definition of a public
Figure 11 Cocreational definition of a market
Figure 12 Cocreational definition of marketing communication
Figure 13 Cocreational definition of segmentation
Figure 14 Altruistic campaigns defined
Chapter 04
Figure 15 Strategic communication ethics defined
Figure 16 Cocreational approach to ethics
Figure 17 Political communication ethic
Chapter 05
Figure 18 Cocreational definition of issue
Figure 19 Stages of an issue life cycle
Figure 20 Cocreational definition of a crisis
Figure 21 Meta‐crisis defined
Chapter 06
Figure 22 Coorientation
Figure 23 Coorientation theory box
Figure 24 Sense‐making theory box
Figure 25 Attribution theory
Figure 26 Trust theory box
Figure 27 Persuasive vs. non‐persuasive SC
Chapter 07
Figure 28 Generic risk formula 1
Figure 29 Sandman's model of risk
Figure 30 Risk formula for strategic communication
Figure 31 Cocreational definition of risk communication
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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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
Carl H. Botan is professor in the Department of Communication at George Mason University.
Strategic Communication Theory and Practice
The Cocreational Model
Carl H. Botan
This edition first published 2018© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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List of Figures and Tables
Figures
1
Strategic information defined
2
Strategic communication defined
3
Grand strategy defined
4
Strategy defined
5
Tactics defined
6
Tactics–strategy continuum
7
Formal–informal theory continuum
8
Cocreational continuum
9
Cocreational molecule
10
Cocreational definition of a public
11
Cocreational definition of a market
12
Cocreational definition of marketing communication
13
Cocreational definition of segmentation
14
Altruistic campaigns defined
15
Strategic communication ethics defined
16
Cocreational approach to ethics
17
Political communication ethic
18
Cocreational definition of issue
19
Stages of an issue life cycle
20
Cocreational definition of a crisis
21
Meta‐crisis defined
22
Coorientation
23
Coorientation theory box
24
Sense‐making theory box
25
Attribution theory
26
Trust theory box
27
Persuasive vs. non‐persuasive SC
28
Generic risk formula 1
29
Sandman’s model of risk
30
Risk formula for strategic communication
31
Cocreational definition of risk communication
Table
1
Grand strategies
Foreword
From the mid‐1960s to the early 1980s the author worked, both paid and unpaid, on behalf of contests for city council, state house, US House and the Bobby Kennedy campaign, founded and operated the People’s Law Program and the Community Law Project, worked with a small and now long defunct community newspaper, served very briefly as a newscaster on an FM station, worked with a number of union campaigns (e.g., United Farm Workers’ grape and lettuce boycotts, Clothing and Textile Workers’ Farah Pants boycotts in southwestern Michigan in the early 1970s and the Professional Air Traffic Controllers during their strike in the early 1980s), worked briefly as a union organizer in the hospitality industry and as a general public relations practitioner. He began to see similarities across these disparate fields, and how they used the same essential knowledge and skill sets. In 1979 he began an academic career teaching labor studies, industrial relations and parliamentary procedure in several Detroit‐area colleges. He defined his academic career as primarily in public relations in spite of the fact that there were almost no public relations courses available in Detroit at that time and he did not get to teach a class actually called public relations until 1984 at Illinois State University. He has taught public relations, research methods and strategic communication at Illinois State, Rutgers, Purdue, Temple and George Mason universities, where he is currently a full professor and recent Director of the PhD program in Health and Strategic Communication at George Mason.
Never turning his back on his chosen field of public relations, the author began to see public relations as one core specialty of a much larger field, so that even in the 1980s he began also to describe his field of work as strategic communication. In retrospect, this was due to no flash of insight or prescience, but probably represented no more than an attempt, possibly motivated by the economics, of finding more consulting clients by describing several years of work in communication‐related jobs in a way that suggested some specialization in one kind of work. Academic papers, articles and book chapters addressing strategic communication, beginning with an issues management approach, followed in 1985 (Brock, Botan and Frey), 1993 (Botan and McCreadie), 1996 (Botan), 1997 (Botan), 1998 (Botan and Soto), 2005 (Botan), 2005 (Taylor and Botan) and 2005 (Botan and Taylor), among others. Numerous grant applications, panel discussions, seminars, consultancies, book chapters and international speeches addressing strategic communication also followed.
Thus this book is in large part a pulling together of a lifetime of work in strategic communication that began before that term became popular. The chapters that follow represent integration, updating and expansion of many of these earlier works as well as much new material not previously published. The result is an approach to strategic communication that encompasses, in addition to public relations, marketing, social marketing, political campaigning, health campaigns, union campaigns, community relations, investor relations, stockholder relations, national development, public diplomacy, military public affairs, risk communication, crisis communication, counterterrorism, social media and organizational intervention and change consulting (cf. Botan, 1990), as well as many other specialty areas of strategic communication.
The reader will be best served by keeping three things in mind while reading:
Not everyone who claims to be in strategic communication is. In fact, many who claim to be in the field just use the term strategic communication because it is a common buzzword in the business world of the early twenty‐first century. It is best to develop your own view of the field as you read and then make your own decisions about who meets your criteria and who does not, including when evaluating this book.
Strategic communication is a subset of the broader field of Communication but there are large numbers of legitimate strategic communication practitioners, a term used in this book to denote both tacticians and strategists together, whose background is in other fields.
What follows is one person’s understanding of a rapidly emerging and evolving field so, although the book is based on both practical experience and scholarship, the views in this book are just one perspective on strategic communication and even then at only one point in time.
Overview of the Book
Many historically quasi‐autonomous communication practices are treated as separate in part because practitioners and scholars do not talk enough with each other and in part because once any organization is structured in some way there can be very strong resistance to change because of perceived budgetary, career or disciplinary/departmental interests. The way strategic communication (SC) is handled in a particular corporation or university serves as a kind of window through which to see how well that organization understands which publics are important to it and what its relationships with those publics are. Many corporations and universities balkanize the strategic communication field, dividing it into multiple organizational compartments because of superficial sensory similarities such as, “we all do a lot of writing,” or “we all need to communicate with our customers.” Both of these views reflect very similar mental models based in the instrumental metatheory discussed in Chapter 2 and throughout this book. But in the larger scheme of things how much, or even how well, we write is not as important as what content we write because the overriding strategic issue of relationships with publics is determined more by content than by form or quantity. Thus, being message‐centered is not nearly as important as being publics‐centered and among the goals of this book is helping develop an alternative metatheoretic view of strategic communication focusing on strategic‐level matters involving relationships with publics.
Some practitioners, particularly in large firms, are a bit ahead of many universities in this regard because they offer services that integrate a broad range of strategic communication practices, although not always with a full understanding of why such services can sometimes be easily integrated and sometimes not. Universities that teach strategic communication related courses also often separate closely related practices into different departments, different schools and even different colleges. They may also combine them inappropriately on the basis of very superficial similarities that comport well with their own assumptions and needs, such as getting a piece of the enrollment or business pie, rather than any real understanding of strategic communication. This book is organized around different views of strategic communication and how these relate both to tactical‐level and more strategic‐level considerations, including ethics specific to strategic communication.
Part I: Elements
In Part I, the two themes of the book are discussed in Chapters 1 and 2. Chapter 1 covers the first theme that strategic communication is a single field, including, among many others, the core subfields of public relations, marketing and health communication. It does so largely through discussing basic concepts that apply similarly across subfields. Chapter 2 discusses the second theme of the book, a new approach to strategic communication called the cocreational approach, by first discussing what theory and metatheory are and then comparing the current metatheoretic assumptions about strategic communication with the cocreational view. Consistent with the cocreational metatheory from the second chapter, Chapter 3 discusses the most important concept in strategic communication, publics. It does so through the lens of the cocreational metatheory from Chapter 2. Finally, Chapter 4 discusses the ethical implications of the cocreational model as they apply across strategic communication subfields.
Part II: Strategies
Part II of the book applies the two main themes, but particularly the cocreational theme, to theory‐level and applied‐level issues in strategic communication (as distinct from the focus on the metatheory level in Chapter 2). It does so by beginning in Chapter 5 with the strategic core of issues and issues management that apply across all subfields. Chapter 6 then discusses examples of existing well‐known theories and evaluates each for its applicability and consistency with the cocreational metatheory. The specific theories discussed are by no means all, or even the best, of the theories available to strategic communication practitioners. They are used here because they are so well known and illustrate two underlying arguments, that there is a body of theory that can help break down artificial boundaries between the subfields of strategic communication and that there is an existing body of theory that supports a cocreational view of strategic communication. Part II of the book concludes in Chapter 7 with a discussion of the strategically focused practice of risk and preparedness communication.
Part III: New Challenges
In fields changing as rapidly as SC, new directions of interest are always emerging as well as new developments in more established areas. Strategic Communication is far too broad, and many of its practices far too new and complex, for any one person, one book, or even a whole firm or university department to keep up with. So in keeping with the primary themes of the book, Part III addresses broad areas of development and practice that cut across many areas of SC practice and scholarship. These include social media and new information technology in Chapter 8 and international and intercultural SC in Chapter 9. Finally, although terrorism has been with us since ancient times, it is a new area of theory and SC practice in the early twenty‐first century that may one day become another major force transforming SC, and it is the topic of Chapter 10. In keeping with the second theme of the book, Part III discusses these areas through the lens of the cocreational metatheory. Many other areas of development and practice belong here, including the special character of SC as one emerging field that is both primarily composed of women and increasingly well‐paid, the continuing practical and ethical issues of studying under one roof both in‐house staff practitioners and external consultants with the large differences in socialization and values this implies, the role of SC in national development and nation‐building worldwide, political religious and tribal SC, and others. However, time and space considerations limited the book to these three broad areas of emerging practice.
Part IElements
1Strategic 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 organizations and what role information plays in SC.
Communication as Constitutive
Because SC is about communication, the discussion in this book assumes an understanding of what communication is, because explaining that is too big a task to add to this book. One important understanding that helps shape this book is that communication plays a much bigger role in organizations than most realize. In fact, as our colleagues in organizational communication have been telling us for more than a generation, communication is more than just a tactical tool of an organization—it is constitutive of all human organizations, meaning that communication is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for building and operating all human organizations. This means communication is a core function of every human organization, so when you work with communication in an organization, you are working with that organization’s very core.
For example, imagine that you have a pile of bricks, money in the bank, a bunch of people standing around who are willing to work, desks and computers. Do you have an organization? No. An organization comes into existence only when repetitive flows of communication are established that allow for specialization and division of labor, as well as coordination. The thing we call an organization is the result (i.e., the “product”) of the process of communication. This is not to say that the organization is made up only of communication, but rather that organizations cannot exist in the absence of systematic communication. Thus SC is not just about externally directed campaigns. Instead SC includes all the strategic uses of communication within and by organizations. In this sense, not only are PR, marketing and health communication subfields of SC, but so is much of organizational communication. No nation, non‐governmental organization (NGO), corporation or military organization comes into existence without SC playing some role, usually a large one, which means that both armies and countries are, in part, products of the process of SC. The idea that communication as constitutive is also used by some to suggest that reality itself is socially constructed through communication (cf. Berger and Luckman, 1966; Gergen, 1985), although this discussion is, again, beyond the scope of this book.
Role of information
Understanding that communication is constitutive of both organizations and publics is important for understanding the role of information in SC. As used in this book, information is simply what reduces uncertainty (Daft and Lengel, 1986; Shannon and Weaver, 1998). In SC this includes both the inflow of information into the organization about publics and the outflow of information to publics that they can use to reduce the uncertainty in their minds. Information is what publics use to create new knowledge and meanings for themselves and others. In a way, information is a fuel for the cocreational process. One major implication of this for SC is that to provide publics with information, what reduces uncertainty, a practitioner must first somehow assess what publics already know. This is another reason real SC always begins and ends with research.
As used in this book, the term “strategic communication” refers only to the planned campaigns that grow out of first understanding what publics think and want. Campaigns based on anything else may be creative, insightful, long, short, well run, poorly run and have other attributes; they just cannot be strategic because their relationship to what publics are thinking is not clear so what are called strategies may not in fact be strategic.
With the size of SC reported, the organization and goal of the book established, and the constitutive role of communication explained, this chapter now turns to one of its two central tasks, explaining and defining SC and closely related concepts, including grand strategy, strategy and tactics.
General Definition and Role of SC
Used by many fields and in many ways, the term SC has taken on a life of its own. Unfortunately, SC is sometimes used as just a buzzword. For example “consultants” selling pre‐packaged sets of fill‐in‐the‐blank forms providing a sort of checklist of the questions that should be answered in planning a campaign seem to think they can charge more if they call the paper with blank lines on it a strategic plan than if the blanks were not labeled as being strategic. Even more problematic are those who believe that simply following orders from higher ups, or being a tactician in a campaign planned by others, makes them strategic communicators. Following this logic a little further would mean that the tactician working on a poorly conceived (non‐strategic) plan would be acting strategically. Perversely, this might even be taken as proof that the plan itself has become ipso facto strategic.
These views of SC are erroneous. In communication, the term strategic should be taken to mean campaign plans based on research. More specifically, as in this book, the term strategic means that good communication strategy begins with what publics think and feel about our relationships with them. Thus it is the information inflow portion of SC that comes first and that can be most important to others in the organization as well. Because SC practitioners who practice strategically are often the most aware of, and often best trained to understand, the range of relationships an organization develops with its publics, the department or division charged with leading SC should usually be the default organization‐wide collector of strategic information, with other departments and divisions engaging in specialized information collection as needed. As a primary provider of strategic information on publics—information which is often time‐critical and can affect both the organization as a whole and relationships among its divisions—there should be a direct reporting link from the information inflow function of SC to at least the COO level of the organization, if not the CEO level.
Thus, SC is one practice with two parts. The first part is collecting strategic information. The second part is developing planned strategic communication campaigns based on the information collected. From the point of view of SC, the information brought into an organization is strategic information insofar as it is information that can be used to describe, explain or predict the relationship between an organization and its publics (Figure 1). Describing, explaining and predicting relationships with publics are then the foundation of strategic campaign planning. This is why real SC always begins with publics and never with the simple wishes of the organization. Strategic campaigns should be based on a realistic understanding of current and potential relationships rather than on wishes. Starting from the wishes of the organization may be part of why campaigns have historically had extremely low (often single‐digit) success rates.
Figure 1 Strategic information defined
People from different fields and with different interests define the term SC in very specific ways so there is little agreement as to what it means. In fact, what SC is and how to practice it can be disputed even within a single organization if it is a large one or highly segmented. For example, Josten (2006) describes parts of the federal government as unable to agree: “presently the Department of Defense (DOD), US Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM), and other USG agencies are struggling with the concept of strategic communication (SC). There are several definitions of SC within the government, with some consensus that Military Information Operations (IO), Public Diplomacy (PD), and Public Affairs (PA) are primary components” (p. 16).
However, these fields often do appear to agree on at least two things about SC. As opposed to non‐strategic efforts, SC involves (1) research about the publics and the lie of the land, and (2) constructing a plan that takes into account both the goals of the organization and the feelings, needs and attitudes of publics. A third common element might be implied, although it is not explicit: (3) SC uses evaluative research to assess how publics think and feel during and after a campaign.
This is an opportune point to introduce a metaphor to help visualize the relationship of subfields to the overall field of SC, and for a definition of SC derived, in part, from my earlier definitions of both the subfield of public relations and of strategic communication.
Tree metaphor of strategic communication as a gestalt
SC is a gestalt, a whole. This simply means that while something is made up of parts, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and that the whole would be something different if any of its parts were missing. A tree can be used as a metaphor for a gestalt because it is made up of roots, trunk, branches, leaves, etc., but none of these can survive on its own. To be a living whole—and greater than the sum of its parts—each part needs the other parts and when they work in concert they make a new living thing.
SC can be thought of as similar to a tree in the sense that the various subfields and the specializations within them are like the branches and leaves of a tree. Each looks separate to the casual observer, but a trunk and root system supports all the branches and leaves and ties them all together into a whole living thing. Therefore, although there are boundaries between the subsystems of a tree (the trunk and leaves do have differences, for example), the boundaries are often not as important as the function of each as a necessary subsystem, what each subsystem contributes to making the whole viable.
The subfields of SC are a little like the branches of a tree in that each looks separate from the others. But there is something that links all of SC together, much as a tree's trunk links the branches together. This SC “trunk” is made up of at least the three things that are characteristic of all SC subfields: (1) the central role of publics in the relationship between a group or organization and its publics, (2) research as the source of information about that relationship, and (3) communication campaigns using strategies derived from research. The most professional strategic campaigns have three additional characteristics: (4) evaluative research and a willingness to be evaluated on the basis of it, (5) an express willingness of the group or organization to change itself to adapt to the needs of publics rather than just seeking ways to get publics to change, and (6) adherence to an ethical code or set of standards. To extend this metaphor just a little more, the whole tree is supported by its root system, which draws nourishment from the soil before there can be branches or leaves. For an organization's strategic communication, the soil we draw nourishment from is our publics, which helps explain numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 just noted. For the purpose of SC strategy begins with publics at the center of the process, and it is our relationship with them that is most important. The message actually exists only to serve this relationship; thus message crafting or testing should never be thought of as a separate part of SC. Figure 2 defines strategic communication from the perspective of the cocreational metatheory (explained in Chapter 2).
Figure 2 Strategic communication defined
This definition involves several components that are discussed throughout the book. For now it is enough to note three things.
Both planning and implementation are part of SC, but the planning and implementation aspects can be separate and carried out by different people. When this happens, the planner is practicing SC while someone who only implements the plans of others is basically just practicing tactical communication.
To help see that this definition is another thread that runs through the book, it can be linked easily to the discussions in
Chapters 2
,
3
and
6
by just stopping to think of a campaign plan as a kind of mini‐theory. The next chapter, for example, defines a theory as a statement about the relationship between two or more phenomena. In a plan, practitioners basically predict that if they do certain things there may be predictable effects on their relationships with publics. Thus, a campaign plan is a kind of mini‐theory.
There are meaningful distinctions between the setting of organizational policies, the development of campaign strategies, and the implementation of a campaign, as discussed next in the relationship of grand strategy, strategy and tactics.
Grand Strategy, Strategy and Tactics
The concepts of strategy and tactics are generally not new to experienced scholars or practitioners, although grand strategy may be. Grand strategy helps explain some of the widely disparate assumptions, findings, and advice in the business literature, the public relations literature, public diplomacy, and elsewhere.
Many fields have used the terms strategy and tactics to mean slightly different things but there are some similarities. Drawing on those similarities, this discussion has four goals, to explain: (1) the idea of analoguing, (2) the idea of grand strategy, (3) four archetypal grand strategies (similar to organizational worldviews), and (4) how grand strategy, strategy and tactics are related. Much of this discussion is an adaptation of Botan (2006) and begins with a brief historical background.
History
Strategy and tactics are concepts originally developed in military sciences over about two and a half millennia, so it is no surprise that SC is used by militaries around the world. Acknowledging the military background of an idea, however, does not mean that SC campaigns should adopt a military perspective or discuss “defeating” anyone. Only the most backward practitioner would suggest such a possibility. Among others, Cutlip (1994) and Moore (2010) have written about the history of SC, although Cutlip’s large volume was limited to the subfield of PR.
Although it may be a bit of a stretch for some readers, Moore (2010) worked with his own view of what SC is and suggested that the earliest SC occurred in the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods and was introduced to help overcome the uncertainties of life then, often with a religious element.
This process [SC] may be speculatively traced archaeologically in the cave paintings and rock art surviving in France, Spain, Australia, South Africa, and the southern United States, or the “Venus” figurines found across central and eastern Europe, to the astonishing ceremonial sanctuaries like Gobekli Tepi in Turkey and other burial chambers and temples of seminomadic and more settled societies of later hunters and early cultivators in at least the Mesolithic and Neolithic, under excavation in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. These first great attempts at organized as opposed to spontaneous or personal communication are, so far as can be known, ritualistic or proto‐religious. (p. 228)
Much ancient architecture had as one of its purposes impressing audiences with how powerful and important the builders were, often by combining the secular with the religious and military. For example, Moore (2010) reported that
Pharaoh Ramesses II combined these features in the temples to himself, his gods, and his family at Abu Simbel completed around 1264 BC, fronted with statues of himself, decorated inside with painted reliefs of Ramesses worshipping himself and defeating the Hittites at Kadesh (in reality a probable tie). Abu Simbel faces the Nile on the southern border of Egypt. The location was important to awe the Nubians to the south. The orientation was important because it was [the] first thing travelers to his land saw as they journeyed downriver. The function and decoration were important because they defined the Pharaoh’s public personality. (p. 233)
I was similarly impressed when visiting the tomb of Ramesses II (also Rameses or Ramses) in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. You enter the tomb through a large somewhat square entry and are immediately surrounded by hieroglyphs painted on the walls and ceiling. These depict both writings from the famous Book of the Dead, a primary religious document of the day, and illustrations of Ramesses’s military victories, with prisoners being marched into slavery and his chariot riding over the broken bodies of his opponents. Since the plan was to seal up the tomb, keeping it hidden and dark for all time, it seemed clear the most likely intended audience was the gods of the day. Thus, combining religious sayings with military depictions and gold may well have been an attempt to communicate a strategic message to the gods that Ramesses either was already one of them, or should be admitted into their membership.
In business, the term strategy appears to have a much shorter history. For example, Kay, McKiernan and Faulkner (2003) say they trace
the evolution of thinking about business strategy over the nearly forty years in which it has been identified as a distinct subject … we begin from the 1960s perspective in which strategy was largely equated with corporate planning, describe the 1970s emphasis on diversification and portfolio planning and observe concern in the 1980s for concentration on the core business and the development of less analytic, more people‐oriented approaches to management. (pp. 27–28)
Although the concept is ancient, the term grand strategy has a relatively short history. The authors of the books Grand Strategy (Sargeaunt and West, 1941) and Strategy (Hart, 1954) are among those who have distinguished between grand strategy and strategy based on the original work of Sun Tzu in the 5th century BCE (Sun Tzu, 1963). For them, strategy operates at the level of a campaign, while grand strategy operates far above the level of a campaign. For example, at the level of a whole country, grand strategy is not a property of the military (except in military dictatorships) but involves questions of policy and planning at the highest levels of government. At the level of a nation, this means, for example, diplomacy and national alliances. Strategy, on the other hand, is a property of campaigns and is about planning and the maneuvering and allocation of resources. As Sargeaunt and West (1941) explained the relationship:
We all try to keep informed on military strategy—the maneuvering of the general staff and the commanders in chief. But what of grand strategy …? This highest type of strategy emanates not from the military chiefs but from the war cabinets and their advisors, above all the Prime Minister or President. (p. vii)
This discussion returns to the relationship of grand strategy, strategy and tactics after a discussion of analoguing, the process being used here to explain grand strategy, strategy and tactics. A short caveat is in order before moving on to analoguing. This discussion of the history of SC has, by virtue of being short, also been very incomplete. Each subfield has its own history, many parts of which may support the view that it is a subpart of SC as described here, and many parts of which may support that view that important aspects of the history of that subfield do not fit within SC. Public relations, for example, has quite different histories in different countries (see the discussion of the matrix in Chapter 9). In the US and Canada, for example, PR largely evolved out of journalism, so views of the field often focus on superficial similarities between journalistic writing and PR writing, as well as the important economic role of media relations practices in both journalism and PR. These similarities exist primarily at the tactical level, however, and ignore the fundamentally different strategic and societal roles of the two fields. The emphasis on using journalism practices at the tactical level in PR has led to a tactical self‐concept for many in PR (including the author, for many years). This tactical self‐concept has in turn contributed to holding down pay levels of practitioners, limiting perceived job opportunities, quite different emphases in PR curricula at the university level and, most important, a message‐ and sender‐centered focus that is diametrically opposed to the cocreational view this book is based in. These difference suggest that some of those in PR who self‐identify with a more tactical perspective, including but certainly not limited to the hired gun and technician models discussed in Chapter 4, may be made uncomfortable, or even angry, by seeing their field discussed as a subfield of strategic communication. It is easy to imagine that there are many such historical artifacts in other SC subfields that merit analysis but doing so would require specialists from each subfield who understand their own subfield, and its history, far better than the author does.
Analoguing
Analoguing is the metatheoretic practice of overlaying terms and their relationships from one theory or conceptual model onto another so as to better understand a relationship under investigation. Hawes (1975) discussed analoguing at length (cf. pp. 7, 110–117) and Botan and Hazleton (1989) discussed its application in the first chapter of Public Relations Theory.
To help make it easy to apply the concepts of grand strategy, strategy and tactics to other strategic communication contexts, it is easiest to start at the grand strategy level and use a hypothetical example. In the military context (recall that SC is not about fighting or conquest), the grand strategic level is government policy and alliances. Therefore, in SC, the analog of the grand strategic level is organizational, industrial, and even society‐level policies and laws. In the military context, the strategic level is the war or campaign planning level usually carried out by a general staff. Strategies address the planning and maneuvering of personnel and resources to carry out a campaign‐level mission and are a property of campaigns. The analog of the strategic level in SC is the planning and maneuvering of resources such as what information will be collected (research) or disclosed, to which publics, what arguments will be made, and in what order. In a military context, the tactical level is the actual fighting required to carry out a strategy and is often conducted by low‐ to mid‐level officers and enlisted personnel. Note that both military organizations and corporations often have a fairly clear line of demarcation between those who carry out tactics and those who do strategic planning. Few if any enlisted personnel are likely to be involved in a general staff’s strategic deliberations, and few if any staff charged with maintaining clippings files or media relations contact lists are likely to be involved in planning the strategy of a $20 million marketing campaign.
For example, if the company you work for as an SC manager has decided to expand from just web‐page hosting into selling advertising, it has made a policy‐level (grand strategy) decision to change the fundamental business it is in, work with new partners and suppliers (the analog of alliances for a nation) and to take on new competitors and new risks. As an SC manager you hopefully shared in the decision‐making process but you did not have the authority to make this decision on your own. Once the policy‐level decision is made, however, you might well take the lead in developing communication strategies for implementing the new policy with customers, investors, the media and employees, among others. You might involve your most senior subordinates in this process but probably not your communication technicians who build and maintain your website. One of your strategies might be to reassure key customers, and maybe investors, before a public announcement so they feel they are trusted and that they can trust you. You might develop several ideas to share with them—strategies—such as emphasizing continuation of their already successful relationship with your company while benefiting from cost savings by having a single company provide both mass media advertising and web‐page content. The strategies involve deciding what ideas and evidence to present, what arguments to make, in what order, to which type of customer. Your strategy is the plan, while the steps taken to actually carry out the plan are the tactics. You might assign people to units to develop ideas to implement this strategy, such as personal informational visits to major investors before the public announcement. Tactics for implementing this strategy might include producing visual aids (videos, booklets, diagrams, etc.), requesting informational meetings and so on. Actually producing the visual aids is not a strategic endeavor, any more than writing and mailing letters or making calls is, but the content (arguments and logic) of them is strategic. The tactics are the concrete form your strategies take, so tactics are often directly measurable while strategies may have to be measured indirectly. For example, this strategy of assessing key customers might have to be measured by critiquing the impact of each of several tactics and then summarizing the effect of the overall strategy. Tactics give your strategies substance and make them real. Without tactics to make them real, strategies are just ideas, in the same way as grand strategies are just wishes without strategies to implement them.
Specifically measurable outputs
Note that a single tactic such as making a video to show customers is often accomplished by breaking the work down into even smaller measurable tasks that can be called specifically measurable outputs. These are the actual units of tactical work that are measured, such as hours used, pages of written script, the number of news releases sent out and so on. Specifically, measurable outputs are not different from tactics in kind (in the way tactics are different from strategy): they are merely the measurable units of work within a tactic. Thus, some tactics are directly measureable because they are specifically measurable outputs. That is, there is no need for smaller units of work to implement some tactics, such as simply giving an oral presentation. Other tactics may be measured through more than one specifically measurable output.
Level of analysis
The relationship between grand strategy, strategy and tactics is easiest to see if one is clear about level of analysis. As strategic communicators, our level of analysis is almost always the campaign level. For us, the grand strategy is the policy‐level decision that we must follow, while tactics are the actual work procedures used to implement the strategic plans we create.
Unfortunately, these three simple‐sounding levels of SC are often hard to differentiate in practice. The relationship between strategy, tactics and specific outputs gets complicated when practitioners lose perspective and begin to think from their own point of view rather than from a campaign perspective. In such cases, practitioners might quite validly say that they got an assignment and had to figure out a strategy for implementing it; or that they are working as part of an SC campaign so they must be being strategic. The level of analysis in SC is the campaign, not the individual practitioner’s workload. As long as practices are looked at from the perspective of the whole campaign, it is easy to see that strategies are parts of the campaign plan. Individual practitioners who think of ways to carry out one piece of a campaign may be being creative and doing SC work but their decisions are not about the whole campaign so what they are doing is not campaign strategy—it is implementing someone else’s campaign strategies. Remember, however, that those strategies only become concrete and have a real‐world existence because someone is implementing them, so each practitioner is a valuable and indispensable part of SC but not necessarily making decisions at the strategic (i.e., campaign) level and that work done without guidance from a strategy is not strategic communication.
With analoguing complete it is possible to define grand strategy, strategy and tactics in general enough terms to be used across SC applications.
Grand Strategy
Most organizations and many publics adopt grand strategies for dealing with their environments. These are analogous to but different from the grand strategies of nations (see Figure 3). For example, Toyota had a grand strategy that led to making three brands of cars for different market segments. As a result, Toyota developed strategies for three advertising and marketing campaigns covering Toyota, Lexus and Scion, which has since merged back into the Toyota brand. Each brand’s marketing strategy must be subordinate to the corporate grand strategy of brand differentiation for different market segments. Corporate grand strategy outranks any one strategic marketing campaign, so, for example, the Toyota brand is not allowed to encroach on Lexus’s luxury turf.
Figure 3 Grand strategy defined
Strategy
Because strategies must be subordinate to grand strategies, the public relations staff of the US White House and the staff of Exxon‐Mobil were constrained by the grand strategies of their organizations during different crises. Exxon‐Mobil practitioners, for example, were no freer to admit wrongdoing after the Valdez oil spill than were Clinton White House practitioners during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
