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Based on the managerial perceptions from large firms, this paper aims to explore the emergence, growth and importance of corporate communications and how it is evolving and creating competitive advantage for Italian firms.

A qualitative approach is deployed, comprising in-depth interviews with senior managers from Italian corporations from a broad spectrum of industries, including: energy, telecommunications, automotive, transport, retail chain, appliances, technology and engineering, private shipping, government-owned holdings, marketing consultancy and construction.

The paper offers insight into corporate communications (corpcoms) practices in the sampled companies. The paper shows that corpcoms involves a complex range of activities leading to performance – managed and implemented under CEO direction.

Corpcoms is perceived as a strategic concept with effective application relative to managing corporate image and reputation. The findings offer insights for communication professionals who deal with corpcoms, branding and marketing communications.

Corpcoms can be viewed via the lens of social actors’ perspectives, i.e. via practitioners – including brand managers and senior executives, as they possess practical knowledge of business practice in specific contextual business settings and have the managerial ability and remit to design, implement and evaluate integrated corpcoms.

Although the market for communication consultancies has been booming worldwide for many years now, there are still only a handful of theoretical concepts and empirical findings pertaining to communication consulting. This is the fundamental starting point for this paper, which sets out to answer the following research questions: What is the function of communication consulting? What are the differences between consultants' expectations of consulting and those of clients? How do consultants and clients deal with the contradiction between proximity and distance? What are the potential threats to the autonomy of consulting?

The paper combines a theoretical framework of communication consulting with a survey of German communication consultants and clients.

First, a theoretical framework is developed in which communication consulting is defined as follows: First, it opens up decision-related contingency and thus produces additional options for managing communicative relationships with internal and external target groups, before helping to close decision-related contingency. The results of the survey show that the expectations of clients and consultants for communication consulting are largely similar. In the closing dimension especially, most clients share the active role of self-conception of most consultants. On the other hand, in some opening activities, clients wish for more critical, independent and courageous consulting.

The scope of the empirical material is limited to communication consultants and clients in Germany and may therefore not be valid in other cultural contexts.

The paper closes a gap in both theory building and empirical research in communication consulting. The theory presented conceives of communication consulting as a hybrid of management consulting and process consulting and, in addition to the opening dimension, also takes the closing dimension of consulting into consideration for the first time. The study reveals a certain schizophrenia in clients: on the one hand, clients demand more critical consultants and thus call for more distance; on the other hand, clients prefer to be close to their consultants, particularly if they wish to work with them for the long-term.

Client satisfaction is one of the major determinants of project success and therefore is a fundamental issue for construction participants who must constantly seek to improve their performance if they are to survive in the marketplace. However, client satisfaction has remained an elusive issue for a majority of construction professionals. This research aims to investigate the performance of construction consultants to determine those key performance attributes which have a crucial impact on client satisfaction, and from that to identify ways of improving the services provided by such consultants.

This research presents the results of a UK‐wide client satisfaction survey based on the performance of a large engineering and management consultancy organisation whom they employed.

Results indicate that key performance attributes for consultants including technical accuracy; overall quality of services and people, have been identified as the main client satisfaction criteria. Clients consider effective communications and their service providers as being most important in determining their satisfaction levels. Furthermore, it is revealed that clients' strategic decisions and the overall performance of consultants in those key areas make a significant contribution towards client satisfaction.

The outcome of this research will improve the understanding of the client satisfaction phenomenon and benefit clients and construction consultants.

This article examines the potential relevance of corporate identity and corporate communication to the merger and acquisition process. Recent studies indicate that around 50 per cent of all mergers failed to produce the synergistic benefits that were expected of them. The authors argue that this failure rate may be attributable to the neglect of corporate identity and corporate communication issues and have identified nine reasons why mergers fail, chief among which are: the undue attention that is given to short‐term financial and legal issues to the detriment of long‐term identity and communication issues; inadequate recognition of the impact of leadership issues on identity and communication; and failure to secure the goodwill of a wide range of stakeholder groups common to both companies. The authors offer a template pertaining to corporate identity and corporate communication issues in the merger and acquisition process which they call the merger mix.

The purpose of this study is to determine the perception of communication and PR agency directors in Colombia regarding strategic communication and its relationship with consultancy when involved with three types of activities: bringing the context close to the organization, providing new knowledge and facilitating change.

This paper provides an exploratory study based on semi-structured interviews of a sample of 55 communication and PR agency directors.

Among the directors interviewed, there are different criteria concerning strategic communication and the services this entails. Although the literature mentions that consultancy should focus on counseling, accompanying, advising and orienting without making decisions for the client or performing any operative activities, many Colombian agencies offer these services, in addition to other technical ones. This is because these are the most requested ones by their clients and so are important in acquiring contracts in the country's communication sector.

The limitation of this study is the absence of a regularly and systematically updated directory and database with the current size of the communications sector and its yearly revenue in Colombia.

Lack of consensus regarding strategic communication consultancy may lead to unfair competition on prices and confounding strategic and nonstrategic services in the market.

New academic knowledge for the communication practices in communication agencies in Colombia and Latin America.

This article arises from initial research done in Colombia on the perceptions of the communication sector's directors regarding the meaning of strategic communication and key capacities in the provision of services under that remit.

Little research exists on the effects of organisational structure on the public relations function. This study focuses on the effects of structural changes on an internal communication function in a large South African organisation. In this organisation internal communication consultants were appointed at divisional level. They had to oversee the election of a communication champion in each cost centre in the division. Survey research conducted 18 months after the process implementation found the structural changes led to improved information flow and face‐to‐face communication. Employees made better use of organisational media and relied less on the grapevine. Although the process made employees less fearful to speak truthfully and improved employee‐supervisor communication, these effects were less pronounced. The research confirmed the important link between public relations strategy and organisational structure, particularly for communication managers and internal communication practitioners in large organisations.

Corporate financial communications concern public and private disclosure (Holland, 2005). This paper aims to explain how banks developed financial communications and how problems emerged in the global financial crisis. It explores policy responses.

Bank cases reveal construction and destruction of the social, knowledge and economic world of financial communications over two periods.

In the 1990s, learning about financial communications by a “dominant coalition” (Cyert, March, 1963) in bank top management was stimulated by gradual change. The management learnt how to accumulate social and cultural capital and developed “habitus” for disclosure (Bourdieu, 1986). From 2000, rapid change and secrecy factors accelerated bank internalisation of shareholder wealth maximising values, turning “habitus” in “market for information” (MFI) (Barker, 1998) into a “psychic prison” (Morgan,1986), creating riskier bank cultures (Schein, 2004) and constraining learning.

The paper introduces sociological concepts to banking research and financial disclosures to increase the understanding about financial information and bank culture and about how regulation can avoid crises. Limitations reflect the small number of banks and range of qualitative data.

Regulators will have to make visible the change processes, new contexts and knowledge and connections to bank risk and performance through improved regulator action and bank public disclosure.

“Masking” and rituals (Andon and Free, 2012) restricted bank disclosure and weakened governance and market pressures on banks. These factors mediated bank failure and survival in 2008, as “psychic prisons” “fell apart”. Bank and MFI agents experienced a “cosmology episode” (Weick, 1988). Financial communications structures failed but were reconstructed by regulators.

The paper shows how citizens require transparency and contested accountability to democratise finance capitalism. Otherwise, problems will recur.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the prerequisites of value co-production by a communication consultant and workshop participants during a communication improvement programme carried out in a medium-sized family firm.

The paper draws from a socio-constructivist view of learning that emphasises participatory processes. It utilises the value co-production concept, referring to collaborative, dialogic activities between the consultant and the client. The theoretical framework includes the transcoder, re-interpreter, and free creator roles of a consultant as realised in a consultancy process characterised by dialogic interaction and equity. The approach is qualitative, and the data come from the expectations of the management team, a video recording of a communication improvement workshop, insights produced in the workshop, and a research journal.

The roles of a consultant were found to be those of organiser, transcoder, re-interpreter, and co-creator. Additionally, a dialogue facilitator role was highlighted as a central prerequisite of value co-production. The importance of a positive spirit in consultancy sessions was questioned because problems can thereby be hidden behind positivity. The value of confusing or even destructive episodes was emphasised as a source of new perspectives.

There are limitations related to the quality of the video recordings, and that the company employees did not yet evaluate the value gained in the long run.

This paper shows that a communication consultant gains insights from company representatives’ insider views in conflict-management situations, and that these conflicts can be useful for organisational learning.

This study contributes to research into strategic communication because it provides new knowledge about the consultant-client interface, particularly in value co-production, in the few studies conducted in the context of SMEs. The study utilises the novel research methodology of video analysis.

A postal survey of directors and managers of corporate communications, communications, public relations, human resource management and marketing was con‐ducted among over 1,000 UK organizations, resulting in the views of over 200 directors and managers being captured and reported. The survey was conducted by members of a UK university research unit which focuses or the development of the emerging field of corporate communications management and the survey was spon‐sored by the UK Chapter of the International Association of Business Communicators. Collates and interprets the data generated in order to explicate a snap‐shot view of the structure, operation, and evolution of the embryonic management field of corporate communications. Researchers recognized that many practitioners are working ahead of any major developments in significant underpinning principles of theory. The needs and possibili‐ties for future development of the field were to be exam‐ined from the results of the study.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the role ingredient branding (IB) plays in shaping the strategic communications created by public relations/corporate communication departments of large organizations when managing crises.

Starting from a literature review on strategic communication and IB the role of this activity is studied within the Italian context. In order to reach the aim of the paper, primary and secondary sources were exploited generating qualitative and quantitative data. The primary data were gathered though in-depth interviews with key management personnel while the secondary data were sourced from reports made available by Tetra Pak Italy.

The study confirmed the contribution of the strategic proactive role played by Tetra Pak Italy managers of External Relations and Marketing Departments and the communication agency manager during a challenging period of crisis for the company. The main implication of the paper lies in the analysis of the important strategic work implemented by the external consultant of communication together with the External Relations and Marketing managers as members of the dominant coalition.

The paper analyses a Tetra Pak Italy case study, as an exploratory case that could demonstrate how strategic communication – based on an IB campaign – is of fundamental importance during a period of crisis. Moreover, the research studied how proactive and effective the role played by the communication consultant and managers of External Relations and Marketing Departments was as a determinant of resulting outcomes.