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Concerns questions such as that posed by the title in respect of the development of corporate communications in its triumvirate form of management communication, organizational communication, and marketing communication as identified by Van Riel (1995). Posits that the major theoretical foundations for corporate communications can be drawn directly from public relations. Terminologies must be firmly anchored in a well understood framework, recognized by both practitioners and academics and based on five crucial research questions.

Marketing organisations increasingly talk about the importance of integrating their communications, of aligning symbols, messages, procedures and behaviours across formal organisational boundaries. Often this implies tighter central control over communications and other organisational processes. This paper sets out to discuss potential negative consequences of such tight control in terms of organisational incapability to react to market changes in increasingly fluid environments due to a loss of sufficient corporate complexity and diversity.

In response, a flexible integration approach that draws attention to the handling of difference and variety within the context of an integrated communications project is articulated. The paper proposes a framework that balances centralisation and decentralisation through attention to dimensions of endogenous control, tight and loose couplings, networks, and common process rules.

The paper demonstrated that, in order to integrate its communications, an organisation needs to embrace diversity and variety and to balance the wisdom of its many voices with the effort to secure clarity and consistency in its overall expression.

The flexible integration approach advanced in this paper opens new avenues of research, practice and pedagogy, encouraging scholars, practitioners and teachers to explore the following dimensions of integrated communications: reception, variability, organisation, voice, couplings and transferability.

The paper contributes to the literature on integrated communications and corporate communications by addressing the organisational dimensions of integration and suggesting a new avenue of integrated communications research that is far more sensitive to the organisational context in which projects of integration exist and unfold.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on how firms draw on historical references in corporate marketing. The paper seeks to analyze the logic behind such efforts from a corporate identity perspective and to propose potential risks and/or benefits of doing so. The paper aims to inspire the understanding of how references to history are used in marketing and the outcome of such use.

The paper mainly draws on literature relating to corporate marketing and the use of history in organizations. Combining these theories, and pointing at empirical examples, the paper clarifies why references to history can be important manifestations of corporate identity. The paper comes up with propositions concerning what consequences the reference to history in corporate marketing can have for firms' marketing strategies and business development.

The paper outlines a connection among corporate identity, organizational identity, and image through corporate communications. It suggests that among the range of corporate characteristics, historical references can be particular valuable for corporate communications thanks to the reliability age can provide (as opposed to liabilities of newness). Still, elaborations suggest that the planned use of historical references has both pros and cons in terms of business development.

Despite the notion that history, as an inevitable and distinctive firm feature, can play an important role in corporate marketing, research on the topic is quite scarce. This paper offers some remedy to this gap by elaborating on the internal and external rationales for applying historical references and how these can be explained in connections between corporate identity and history.

The repertories of the corporate past perspective is introduced and articulated and is placed with the corporate communications and corporate marketing domains. The framework consolidates and expands the comprehension of multifarious actualisations of the past as a corporate-level phenomenon. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A literature review, which draws on the extant corporate heritage literature within corporate marketing and corporate communications along with other salient perspectives within social sciences, is integrated into a conceptual framework of past-related corporate-level concepts.

The paper advances the extant literature by making a distinction between instrumental and foundational past-related corporate-level concepts. A framework is introduced and articulated detailing seven different modes of referencing the past of an organisation: corporate past, corporate memory, corporate history, corporate tradition, corporate heritage, corporate nostalgia, and corporate provenance.

The paper clarifies the current state of this nascent field of corporate marketing and communication scholarship concerned with the historicity of corporate-level phenomena and advances the conceptual understanding of the multiple ways in which links with an organisation's past can be understood and scrutinised offering an integrated framework of seven conceptual lenses for future research.

Managers, by more fully comprehending the repertoires of the corporate past, are, the authors argue, better placed to discern whether the past is of material benefit to their organisations. If so, the repertoires of the corporate past perspective may enable managers to more effectively manage, maintain, and capitalise on their organisation's past in multiple ways.

This paper is substantively informed by both the corporate heritage literature and the salient literature from the social sciences. The introduction of a repertoire of the corporate past framework, arguably, represents an important contribution to the domain.

Outlines 15 explanations for the fog which has enveloped the nascent domains of corporate identity and corporate marketing. However, the fog surrounding the area has a silver lining. This is because the fog has, unwittingly, led to the emergence of rich disciplinary, philosophical as well as “national”, schools of thought. In their composite, these approaches have the potential to form the foundations of a new approach to management which might be termed “corporate marketing”. In addition to articulating the author’s understanding of the attributes regarding a business identity (the umbrella label used to cover corporate identity, organisational identification and visual identity) the author outlines the characteristics of corporate marketing and introduces a new corporate marketing mix based on the mnemonic “HEADS”[2]. This relates to what an organisation has, expresses, the affinities of its employees, as well as what the organisation does and how it is seen by stakeholder groups and networks. In addition, the author describes the relationship between the corporate identity and corporate brand and notes the differences between product brands and corporate brands. Finally, the author argues that scholars need to be sensitive to the factors that are contributing to the fog surrounding corporate identity. Only then will business identity/corporate marketing studies grow in maturity.

Corporate identity has become one of the major topics in the field of corporate marketing studies, but the relationship between corporate marketing management and corporate‐identity building seems still stuck at the stage of operational rather than strategic considerations. Corporate identity is understood largely in terms of instrumentality for enhancing competitive advantage, and corporate marketing is mostly discussed as only an execution part in representing corporate identity to the stakeholders. To address this issue, the purpose of this paper is to propose a model which explicates the strategic roles the corporate marketing manager plays in building effective corporate identity.

The paper explores strategic management of the corporate‐identity construction process and marketing communication management of corporate‐identity representation from the perspectives of sociology, organisational psychology and corporate marketing communication, primarily based on the narrative paradigm. Detailed theoretical exploration, coupled with several conceptual propositions as well as analyses of exemplary cases, provides academic and practical implications for corporate marketing researchers and managers.

The proposed model conceptualises that the corporate marketing manager assumes three strategic roles for building effective corporate identity: narrative coordinator to manage the narrative construction process, narrative‐network weaver to manage the narrative network, and narrative co‐author to manage the external communication programmes. These roles define the strategic relationship between corporate marketing management and corporate‐identity building.

The paper contributes to furthering the understanding of how to use the narrative paradigm for effective corporate‐identity building, which may help enhancement of business performance.

The goal of this paper is to understand the relationship between advertising spending and the volume and valence of publicity, and assessments of corporate brands (opinion, value and reputation).

Two studies examine major multi‐national companies as brands by bringing together five unique industry datasets to understand the connection between the assessments of the corporate brand and marketing communication activity. Discriminant analysis is used to study the differential impact of advertising and publicity on corporate brand attitude and value.

Publicity and advertising volume are important drivers in differentiating between firms with lower and higher brand evaluations. Overall, publicity valence, in and of itself, had little effect outside of the volume of positive and negative stories. Further, the role of prior corporate reputation works in conjunction and has unique effects that influence the communication activities of firms with high and low brand attitudes and value. The valence of publicity matters least for firms with strong prior reputations. Instead volume dominates for these firms. For lower reputation firms, the mix of communication that distinguishes stronger and weaker performance is more complex with both publicity valence and publicity and ad volume playing slightly different roles in the two studies.

The findings suggest that companies with different levels of brand evaluation (opinion and value) have distinct marketing communication profiles which can be labelled communication footprints. Further, this relationship is moderated by prior corporate reputation. Firms seeking to change stakeholder evaluations must pay particular attention to both the overall volume of publicity received, as well as the ratio of positive to negative publicity volume. Advertising spending plays an important supportive role in these evaluations.

The study adds to the understanding of the communication signals that influence corporate branding. Specifically, it brings together a unique set of industry data to investigate the influence of marketing communication activities on brand opinion and value. Further, the findings contribute to the discussion of the role that company publicity and volume play in developing the corporate brand.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the current state of research on the significance of big data in and for corporate communication and to introduce a framework which provides specific connecting points for future research. This is achieved by summarizing and reviewing the insights provided by relevant articles in the most significant scholarly journals. The paper also investigates trends in the literature.

On the basis of a systematic literature review, 53 key articles from 2010 to 2015 were further analyzed.

The literature review illustrates the potentialities of big data for corporate communication, especially with regard to the field of marketing communication. It also reveals a dramatic lack of research in the fields of public relations and internal communication with respect to big data applications.

The online databases used in this paper comprised of refereed scientific journals with the highest impact factor in the respective disciplines. Journals with a lower impact factor and books were not included in the search process for this thematic analysis.

This paper provides a conceptual framework that describes four phases of strategic big data usage in corporate communication. The results show how big data is able to highlight stakeholders’ insights so that more effective communication strategies can be created.

This paper brings together previously disparate streams of work in the fields of communication science, marketing, and information systems with respect to big data applications in corporate communication. It represents the first attempt to undertake a systematic and comprehensive interdisciplinary overview of this kind.

The latest advances in digital technologies have changed the way companies communicate with their stakeholders. This chapter explores the businesses’ usage of digital communication channels. It focuses on their utilization of social media for marketing and promotion of products, corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices and stakeholder engagement with financial stakeholders. An exploratory study was carried out on a sample of 167 Italian businesses. It investigated the companies’ websites and their social media accounts. The findings suggest that the Italian businesses are using various social media networks for corporate communication purposes. This descriptive research shows that they are utilizing Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube, among others, to communicate commercial information and to promote their business. Moreover, they are using Instagram and Twitter to raise awareness about their CSR initiatives. In conclusion, this chapter implies that marketers need to carefully coordinate the use of different digital tools to ensure that they reach their target audiences in an effective manner.