Posts Tagged ‘Brand Management’

I could not help but feel a sense of sympathy for Walmart’s communications team (IR, corporate comms, PR, internal comms) when reading this past Sunday’s front-cover New York Times story about the company’s bribery scandal (my colleague Jen highlighted the communication implications on Unboxed Thoughts yesterday). While I possess no inside knowledge beyond what the story outlined, I was repeatedly struck by what indicated to me an incident where top-level company officials thought they knew best and proceeded without counsel from a broader circle of advisors. As a communications practitioner, we have all been there. Company officials will often focus on only the legal consequences and not the impact on other constituents. The mindset is that legal trumps all, except when it’s only one facet of an issue like this one. In today’s world, communication is not a “siloed” discipline. Corporate governance is not the sole purview of legal. This responsibility now also falls to IR. But financial impact is no longer limited to IR and now trickles down to PR. My point is that communications is a chain; it’s all interwoven and as the old adage goes, you are only as strong as your weakest link. If you keep one constituency in the dark, you can bet that’s where the trouble will arise.

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