Topic The Language of Strategic Communication

Strategic communication

LECTURE 1 Course introduction

Strategic communication
 Often seen as war or a game most negative context  but not always true
 Strategic fist used in 1950s in relation to organizations
 Term originates from Greek for generalship
 Negative associations

Classic prospective (Rational decision making)
 SWOT: Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, Threat
 Strategic communication seen as a rational decision-making
 Determining the best strategy for the organization b< conducting a SWOT analysis
 Strengthens a negative perspective on strategic communication something only for the boss/manager

Contemporary prospective
 Not only responsibility of management
 Everybody in organizations is responsible for strategic communication
 Found in specific areas:
 Change organizational change, smaller changes (how teams operate..)
 Inherent part of organization’s culture: inspires and reflects strategic communication
 How an organization is embedded in society is very important
 How do they function in society?
 Different from first perspective: only focus on their goals (how they can serve themselves, instead of their
society)
 No just a document, but seen in day-today practice
 Everybody contributes (es helpdesk employee)

Definition of strategic communication (Hallahn et.al 2007)
 communicating purposefully to advance the mission of an organization
 Hallahn (2004) 6 different specialties
 Management communication facilitate orderly operations of organization
 Marketing communication create awareness and promote sales
 Public relations establish and maintain beneficial relationships with key constituencies
 Technical communication educate employers/consumers to improve efficiency
 Political communication build political consensus or consent on important issues
 Information/social marketing communication reduce incidence of risky behavior

 Disappearance of traditional boundaries integrated marketing communication
 strategic communication isn’t the same:
 more purposeful, focus on presentation and promotion of organization through intentional activities of
leaders, employees and communication practitioners

 Why use term strategic communication?
 The ability of communicators to differentiate between traditional communication activities and their effects is
rapidly disappearing
 Important changes in public communication are driven by technology and media economics
 Organizations use an expanding variety of methods to influence the behavior of their constituencies (not
isolated integrative)
 Strategic communication recognizes that purposeful influence is the fundamental goal of communications by
organizations




Interdisciplinary (Werder et al., 2018) connected to a lot of other things, not only comm. Science

, Communication science
 Organization science
 Marketing
 Cognitive psychology
 Social psychology
 Linguistics
 Philosophy

5 Military strategies from Sun Tzu that can be applied in a business setting, according to Forbes: (articles “5 ChatGPT
Prompts to apply the art of war to your business”)
 Know yourself and your enemy
 strategic positioning and timing
 Adopt a more flexible strategy (es if things go wrong)
 Incorporate deception
 Lead by example

Strategic communication
 Other classic definition related to games
 Winners and losers
 Dog-eat-god world one organization win aginst others org.

Winners and losers
 Narrative perpetuated in the media
 Dutch newspaper “De Volkskrant” has a weekly column mentioning the organizational winner and loser of the past
week (es this year Elon mask)

Strategic communication
 Classic perspective Asymmetrical
 Top-down communication
 From manager to employee

Transmission model
 Classic perspective on communication
 Sender-receiver model
 Get information from here to there (the the audience)

Strategic communication
 New perspective Strategic communication at every level in the organization (not just managerial level)
 ES:
 Social media  if u go on social media and they talk about organization and the audience get positive
thoughts, the social media account that is managed by employees)
 Response to negative comments by clients (employees response and everyone can see it)
 Jumbo radio professional dj and ask employees to call and talk about their experiences working

Organizations and societal issues
 Organizations need to communicate specific societal issues  Otherwise could be as a very specific stand to u take
on this problem

Strategic communication is about changes
 Strategic communication is about culture how the org. responds and use communications
 Strategic communication is about practice and how they act

, Ritual model of communication
 Interactive perspective on communication
 Communication as symbolic process in which reality is created, maintained, repaired and transforms by
communication
 Emphasis on meaning

Strategic communication
 “communicating purposefully to advance the mission of an organization” (Hallahan et al., 2007)
 “The practice of deliberate and purposive communication that a communication agent enacts in the public sphere
on behalf of a communication entity to reach set goals” (Holtzhausen and Zerfass, 2013)


Professional communication field (NL)
 BNP model (profiles of different levels of the job)
 Communication jobs in the professional fields can be divided based on:
 Job level
 Based on seniority on the position and field
 The highest the level the more responsibilities
 Distribution of one or more of six core tasks
 Training Making individuals more communicative in order for the organization to get to a higher level (es
giving feedbacks to improve)
 organizing  make sure that people can communicate/interact in some ways (es taking care of meetings)
 Analyzing  mapping important issues (group dynamics that break down: stereotyping and group thinking)
 Integrating  Planning, adjusting and implementing communication porcess
 Creating  creating communication material
 Advising advice and strategies for other communication (making organization more communicative)
 For all core tasks Language is important  focus of this course

 Different kinds of communication:
 Interpersonal communication
 Group communication
 Communication at organizational level

LECTURE 2  Training

 Training = making individuals within an organization more communicative
 A as communication person when engaging with training help others to be more communicative

Organizational dilemma interpersonal communication
 how should you communicate within a meeting?
 How can you best formulate your critique?

Conversational implicatures
Pragmatics how context contributes to meaning
 Subfield of linguistics
 Words can have different meanings in different contexts
 Orange color, fruit, Dutch royal family/football team

Speech acts  when we look at the statement we ca look at them with 3 different prespectives
 Locutionary act  what was said focused on specific words used in specific context
 question, statement

 Illocution  communicative goal that the speaker wish to archive using that communication es indirect language
 information, action
Types of illocutionary acts:
 Assertive: committing a speaker to the truth of a proposition