The McKinsey’s 7S diagram demonstrate that in order to be successful maintaining and establish a corporate identity it is unavoidable to align all factors of a company like structure, staff, strategy, systems, skills, style and the shared values. Furthermore Davis Young describes in his book that the company has to be aware of the following items while considering the own corporate identity: 1. “Important decisions by stakeholders are invariably based on trust 2. There is no quick or easy way to have a good reputation.
3. A god reputation is everyone’s job, not just management’s 4. You cannot have a good external reputation unless you have a good internal reputation 5. It may take years to build a reputation but only a moment to destroy one” To maintain the identity you will also have to conduct a research and conclude the view of the stakeholders and the senior management on existing and desired image. Afterward you have to check all elements of the actual identity and compare it to the desired image. Finally if necessary a plan to conform the corporate identity has to be formulated.
But the problems in maintaining a corporate identity are that a corporation continually has to ensure the quality of their suppliers’ products. Because of the globalisation more and more products get sourced and a bad quality of a supplied component will go back to the own company. Furthermore ethnical and environmental issues have to be considered. Some customers place high value on corporations which are not being involved in gambling and defence. But the companies are also under stress because of technological factors and changing work patterns. They have to retain educated employees which can now, because of demographic changes, choose a job they want. Also the cultural effects hiring employee from other cultures have to be considered.
To assure that the corporate identity is successful and stays that way you should ensure that each part of the staff is deliberate about being a representative of the company. For this purpose there should also be some guidelines issued. Furthermore the corporation should try to create a unique identity and to shine out from their competitors. The design should also fit the brand and the image of the company. Finally the promises have to be kept in order to demonstrate reliability.
Organisational identity management strategy The management function organisational public relation use different strategies in order to achieve their aims and objectives. Therefore a ‘reseach’ will be necessary to clarify and identify issues to define the business strategy and furthermore you may determine specific questions as who your target stakeholders are. ‘Aims’ are the basic reasons for your communication strategy.
Thus’Objectives’ are measurable and time-specific goals and should be SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time bound). Based on the objectives you can clarify your stakeholders and the message you like to transmit. Also ‘tactics’ explain how to achieve the objectives and which tools are going to be used. But with due regard to the timing, placement and budget. Finally ‘effects’ also concern the ‘how are we doing’ but additionally consider the monitoring and evaluation of the entire elements of this model. It is important to ensure efficiency and whether in the end the aims and objectives have been reached.
Organisational reputation process The reputation process of an organisation is encased with an environmental and sector of activity context, like politics, technology, economy, which can influence every section and stage or the whole process of the model. This model describes the influence of covert and overt culture elements to the following stages. The overt and covert interface is the overlap between those cultural elements. The organisational public relations are placed in the overt section of the model and act proactive and purposely. An organisation identity has an overt and a covert part since some facets are developed by the communication of a company and the other without the company being involved.
The audience which are receiving this identity are the stakeholders while they are creating an image of the organisation. This image differs between every stakeholder and this plenty of images are getting accumulated by time. So through some time an organisational reputation is becoming formed. Thereby the reputation also varies through stakeholders and can be affected by environmental forces. Finally to get some feedback from the stakeholders the company has to do some research. But there also could arise some feedback from unplanned channels like gossip.