Seminar - Cecilia Casalegno

Cecilia Casalegno (University of Torino) will present her paper “Bridging Corporate Communication and Marketing Narratives for organizational success: 
How collaboration happens.” You can find the abstract below and the manuscript attached in this message.

Abstract

Purpose of the paper: The aim of our paper is to outline clear boundaries and effective overlaps between corporate communication and marketing in terms of tasks, target audience, media usage, and message contents to explore whether and how synergistic collaboration between the two functions is needed and works in multinational enterprises (MNEs). We will identify which situational contexts, topics, and trends favor or prevent managers’ collaboration and interaction. In doing that, we will also outline the main driving forces and challenges. 
Methodology: We employed a qualitative approach, incorporating both focus groups and elite interviews with corporate communication and marketing executives from multinational enterprises across various industries. 
Findings: The paper's findings outline: the strategic relevance of corporate communication in guiding corporate strategies and actions; the integration between corporate communication and marketing in defending brand reputation; the support of corporate communication to marketing in reformulating advertising campaigns according to a multi-stakeholder perspective. 
Research limitations: Despite our findings having been validated among a variety of industries and their representative leaders, they are still based on a limited sample of MNEs, therefore their generalizability may be limited. 
Practical implications: We provide several practical suggestions to both corporate communication and marketing managers, as for how to establish proactive and long term collaborations between the functions by aligning the strategic planning of marketing actions and corporate communication toward a multi-stakeholder perspective. 
Originality of paper: Our paper offers novel insights, based on empirical observations, on how the integration between corporate communication and marketing can benefit the strategic and multi-stakeholder significance of both.