Larry D. Lauer

In Washington DC everyone seems to understand the term “strategic communication.” It simply refers to the professional practice of helping organizations and individuals become better understood. But in other places I continue to have people ask me “What is strategic communication?”  These people are more accustomed to the terms “public relations and advertising.”

In past posts I have referenced how public relations and advertising as a field of study became strategic communication in my work. Simply put, it was a matter of my concluding that a new and more complicated world required bringing other related disciplines into my thinking and planning.

Over the years I have seen everything about communication become more complicated. Media revolutions changed everything, from the array of tools I used to consumer impact and choices. As technology made the world smaller, the internationalization of virtually every industry added cultural and political complications. And so as institutions struggled to be better understood in a universe of information clutter, earlier promotion and advertising campaigns were no longer sophisticated enough.

And so some of us became “pioneers” in our struggles to cope with this new complexity as we began to look to other fields of study to bolster our work. I experimented with adapting integrated and strategic marketing ideas to communicating academic institutions, and wrote three books about it (www.case.org/books). This changed our thinking from promoting what was there, to getting involved with planning and rethinking programs, price, distribution, and communication simultaneously… realizing that no amount of communication can make a program or institution successful unless it meets a perceived need.

This new way of thinking led to realizing that the field of “group dynamics” provided leadership tools to get everyone on the same page with respect to competitive advantage, and to motivate them to help tell the story.  This added energy to the power of “word-of-mouth,” which in a new media world could become even more powerful as internet “buzz!”  And this led to looking at the field of “organizational behavior” to understand how to deal with various leadership styles and internal political issues which too often became barriers to success.

And so many of us adopted the term “strategic communication” to describe what we believe to be a more substantive approach to public relations and advertising, one that incorporates the study of integrated marketing, group dynamics, and organizational behavior to meet the challenges of a more sophisticated world.