Strategy

One of you made a comment in a previous post that Cornelissen sounds like he agrees with the content. That’s the problem with textbooks—they need to present information objectively (of course, there’s no such thing) and, in doing so, take on a passive type of stance. I don’t think Cornelissen necessarily agrees with everything he is writing, we’d have to read his articles to see his real arguments, but he does understand what he’s talking about and how it should b—at least theoretically. For example, he said that communicators should be in on the strategic planning and not just the implementation of a strategy. This is absolutely correct, but how common is that? If it’s not common, I suspect that one reason is that situating an employee at the strategic level means paying that person more. He says on page 94 that there are two types of communicators: communication technicians and communication managers. This is the difference, I think, of what’s viewed as practical and what’s viewed as theoretical. If you’re a technician, you’re doing rote work—grammar and spelling checker, fact checker, and so on. But if you’re a manager, you are paid to think bigger and more theoretical: he says that “corporate leaders do feel that corporate communication as an area of practice, “will be more valued when advice is offered by professionals who have the background, knowledge and standing that will enable them to contribute to decision-making at the highest levels” (p. 95). As long as they think of a communicator as a mere technician—or wordsmith (I hate that term), they will never make more money or be as respected.

He does point out, however, that many technicians lack the knowledge and skill of business, finances, and the strategy-making process. This is not a bad point (although I think communicators need strategy skills to write well), which is one of the reasons I want you all to write an industry report, to discover what you need to know in order to work in a particular industry. It’s not enough to simply know how to communicate; you need to know how to communicate in a particular context. I’m hoping the reports (which will be shared among all of us) will shed some light on an area you’ve been thinking about for your future. What most people know about a business comes from advertising, but each industry has trade magazines that tell you a lot more than simply why to buy their product.

On page 113, Cornelissen says that a message style involves “the creative concept that articulates the appeal of the message and brings it to life through the use of catchy slogans and visual stimuli (pictures, images, logos, and the typographic setting of a message).” Creative thinking is essential for critical thinking. But this statement seems to suggest that creative people make things pretty and come up with catch phrases. I get this perspective a lot because I do document and information design. But design grows out of content, so one has to have an understanding of the message in order to do the communication, which if you take my Information Design class next fall, you’ll learn all about that. But does this perspective add to the idea of “fluff”?