Handbuch Strategische Kommunikation: Langfristiger Unternehmenserfolg durch Stakeholdermanagement

Strategic Communication is a relatively young discipline, which gains more and more acknowledgement in practice and academia. Strategic communication respects that organisations are not only communicating by words, pictures, symbols and logos, but as well by products and brands. Even more important became the communication by corporate behaviour and acceptance of corporate social responsibility. In this understanding, organisations depend and rely much on stakeholder management, proposing that simple shareholder orientation is not sufficient within the permanent struggle for survival.

This splits corporate communications into two streams, market and non-market communication, which are both important with regard to create a unitary perception for an organisation and involves a variety of disciplines with their different theoretical frameworks.

Hence, the approach of Strategic Communication comprises three major disciplines, strategy, marketing and communication. In the understanding of Strategic Communication, these disciplines should not be taken as separate organisational efforts to address target groups, but should be united in one holistic endeavour for the achievement of an organisation's unitary perception. This challenges the present borderlines especially between marketing and communication as not being any more appropriate in the ways they are applied and implemented in organisational structures. Unitary perception itself is an important means for gaining competitive advantage and, as a tool, for achieving wider awareness in an over-communicating world.

As well, Strategic Communication is oriented towards the markets of the future, which cannot be seen as those today. This means that theories, concepts and models of marketing and communication need to be developed further to deal with permanently changing consumer behaviour, especially with regard to postmodern hyper-consumers.

Strategic Communication as an overarching discipline and coordinating function for an organisation's marketing and communication is therefore suggested as an appropriate synthesis for value-oriented and sustainable organisational performance.