How to make Corporate Language strategic

#corporatelanguage, #languagestrategy, #strategicorganizationalcommunication

This is a follow up article on ?What is Corporate Language and why is it important for organizations?“. In this past article I introduced the concept of Corporate Language with a definition approach of mine as well as an explanation what it consists of. An important take from this article was that a Corporate Language should be aligned to business goals, communication goals, audience needs and it should also be aligned to a content strategy so that the language supports the content goals.

In this following article I want to focus on the question how a corporate language becomes strategic. At the beginning we will take a brief look at the concept of strategic organizational communication and follow with how it can benefit the development of a strategic corporate language.

What is strategic organizational communication?

As Dühring (2023) stated in her lecture at FH Joanneum, Graz, Austria: Strategic communication has probably been around since humankind exists. It is a term used with different definitions, some of which define the term more broadly while others define it in a more narrowed way. One such definition is the following:

"a planned out communication to reach a substantial goal critical to the survival of an entity" (Zerfass, Vercic, Nothhaft & Werder, 2018)

To increase the chance for an organization’s message being understood by audiences as the organization intended and their underlying goal being reached, organizations need to make plans for their communication to be successful, they need to develop strategies for successful communication. This is where the discipline of strategic organizational communication can provide useful tools to get from an organizations goals to communication goals to topics with a prioritization plan that is aligned to the corporate strategy.

How do you get from corporate strategy to communication strategy?

One of these tools is the Communication Value Cycle (CVC) which is a useful framework that shows the relation between corporate strategy, corporate goals, communication value dimensions and communication goals. By showing these relations between the corporate strategy level and the communication level the Communication Value Cycle becomes

?a useful tool for testing existing communication strategies. By analyzing gaps between corporate and communication goals, communicators can detect misalignment and refocus their activities. The CVC can also be used to match all communication goals with performance indicators. This helps to reflect on existing measurement activities.“ (Volk, Berger, Zerfass, Bisswanger, Fetzer, K?hler, 2017).

Aligning the organizational communication to the corporate strategy and aligning the future communication activities to the developed communication strategy is where communication becomes strategic.

Since Corporate Language is an important part of an organizations communication the creation of the components of a corporate language should also be aligned to the communication strategy.

How does the communication strategy influence the corporate language development?

In my last article I introduced different categories or components which make up a corporate language with the potential to extend the list (See as a reminder the following picture).

For each of these different categories of corporate language like terminology, formula symbols, brand and product names, tone and voice, slogans etc. there exist different criteria that help in creating a good term, good name etc. These criteria often come from best practice recommendations by experienced players in the field or organizations that establish standards.

However, different criteria can contradict each other. Almost never one will find a term, name etc. which fulfills all criteria. Therefore it is necessary in practice to develop an evaluation system with which the best fitting variant is selected for the corporate language. Such an evaluation system makes sure the preferred variants for the corporate language are chosen according to a system that ensures high quality and that is aligned to goals.

One way to develop such an evaluation system is to define the different levels of fulfillment for each criteria and combine this with a prioritization plan for the different criteria to find the variant which scores the highest. We will talk about such evaluation systems more in a future article.

Prioritizing criteria is where the corporate language evaluation system can be aligned to the communication strategy to ensure the chosen preferred variants (e. g. preferred synonyms) are aligned to the corporate strategy through the communication strategy. For example if a prioritized communication value area in the communication strategy is to support the development of crisis resilience of the organization then this could result in the term criterion of neutrality (terms being free of connotation) having a higher priority in the evaluation system.

Or the term criterion of norm and law conformity and the criterion legal availability for brand and product names could also get a high priority in this scenario since term and name variants which are compliant to norms and laws prevent the organization from being legally vulnerable in this regard.

Or if the communication value area of customer preferences is prioritized in the communication strategy this could lead to a higher prioritization of the term criteria customariness and suitability for target groups as well as those criteria that ensure the understandability of terms and the concepts behind them.

This is an example on how the prioritization in a communication strategy can influence the evaluation system to find preferred variants for the corporate language.

But what about the content strategy?

How does a content strategy influence the corporate language development?

The content strategy is ideally aligned to organizational goals, audience needs and communication goals with a focus on the content to be developed. Content goals and requirements are derived from said organizational goals and audience needs. For example such a content goal could be to support the need of audiences by providing them troubleshooting information specific to their bought product when they have a machine standstill and they get the content delivered to their devices in the factory when they scan a label on the product or click a help button on the monitoring software.. In combination with a business goal to use internal resources efficiently and effectively it could become a content requirement to modularize the content into components and delivering them product specific to audiences automatically through a well thought-through metadata scheme.

So how would this content strategy scenario influence the corporate language?

We would need to make sure that for example the terms used in metadata and taxonomies used in the content delivery scenario support the automatic content delivery and the communication between systems. This could mean we have to prioritize term evaluation criteria like norm and law conformity so it is more likely that terms are preferred which are already used in external standards like schema.org or iiRDS. Or we would need to prioritize term criteria like how much the term is already established in the company (not a standard criterion, but valid if you consider change efforts and necessary resources for that).

The content strategy can therefore also have an impact on the prioritization of evaluation criteria for different parts of the corporate language. How much and in which way this impact will be depends a lot on the organization, the content goals and requirements as well as the resource situation and system landscape.

Conclusion

Corporate Language can have a positive impact on the fulfillment of organizational goals, audience needs, communication goals and content strategies. But to be aligned the corporate language itself needs to be developed strategically. Using evaluation systems for the different parts of the corporate language where the preferred variant is chosen based on the level of fulfillment of the criteria and the prioritization of the criteria, is a possible way of developing corporate language strategically. Especially the prioritization, but also the definition of the different levels of criterion fulfillment can be aligned to a communication strategy and a content strategy that have both been already aligned to business goals and audience needs. By doing this the strategic corporate language can do its part in contributing to an organizations value creation.

See also

What is Corporate Language and why is it important for organizations?

The influence of language on content experience and user experience

References

Dühring, Lisa (2023). Strategic Organizational Communication. No. 1 Introduction. Presentation. Fh Joanneum. Graz, Austria

Volk, Sophia Charlotte, Berger, Karen, Zerfass, Ansgar, Bisswanger, Luisa, Fetzer, Marcus, K?hle, Karolin (2017). How to play the game. Strategic tools for managing corporate communications and creating value for your organization. Communication Insights. Academic Society. Issue 3

Zerfass, Ansgar, Vercic, Dejan, Nothhaft, Howard & Werder, Kelly Page (2018). Strategic Communication: Defining the Field and its Contribution to Research and Practice. International Journal of Strategic Communication, Vol. 12 (4)