Managing High Performance Teams to Gain Product Leadership
Take a look at organizations that are considered to be product leaders in their respective fields like Intel, Google, Microsoft, Apple, GE, 3M, and Phillips etc. It is evident that the Organizations are totally focused on innovation and R&D. Developing, improving and creating products for tomorrow as well as thinking of the future. It is […]
International Retailing and Technology
International Retail and Fashion has come of age. We can trace the evolution of the industry from early 1990s where in industrialisation and other concepts like JIT, ECR and new Supply chain models helped the growth as well as restructuring of procurement methods. Further development and availability of space and building materials enabled the large […]
The 7 P’s of Services Marketing
The first four elements in the services marketing mix are the same as those in the traditional marketing mix. However, given the unique nature of services, the implications of these are slightly different in case of services. Product: In case of services, the ‘product’ is intangible, heterogeneous and perishable. Moreover, its production and consumption are […]
Importance of Relationship Marketing
The recent trend seen in the Organizations across the world is that they are faced with changing times and the changing economies and business is forcing them to change themselves too. Organizations today have no option but to change and evolve. The change has to do with every aspect of business and not limited to […]
The internet micro environment
Introduction The environment under which organization functions determines how it will conduct its business. Organizations have to constantly monitor and appraise the external business environment. Organizations have to make changes in its operations in accordance to the environment as to be profitable and effective. Therefore, understanding the business environment is important before developing any marketing […]
Corporate philanthropy is the act of donating money to social causes. In these times, when corporate social responsibility is the buzzword what with governments specifying the terms under law, corporate philanthropy is no longer the earlier scenario where employees pool together money with matching contribution from the organization and then they decide to donate it to charitable and social causes. On the other hand, corporate philanthropy in recent years has taken on a dimension that is equal in scale and scope to a separate organization by itself.
Further, corporate philanthropy is not limited to interactions between the corporate communications teams and individual NGO’s but instead, it operates on a vastly larger scale.
Direct Marketing is the act of reaching out to the people by sending mailers and promotional messages with the intent of persuading them for a specific purpose. Typically, direct marketing is handled by the corporate communications teams since they have the expertise and the bandwidth to send mass mailers and promotional materials directly to the target audience.
However, in recent years, because of the sheer volume of material that is being sent out as well as the large numbers of people in the target market, separate departments have been setup to handle this activity.
Further, there is coordination between corporate communications team and the direct marketing team to ensure that the message is lucid, clear, and catchy.
We have discussed how more and more business leaders are giving away a large portion of their wealth to philanthropy. Wealthy businesspersons like Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, NR Narayana Murthy, and Azim Premji, have been in the news recently because of their humungous contributions to social causes.
In this context, the debate over whether corporate philanthropy must be part of the functions of the corporate communications teams or whether it must be separate and a specific department setup for it has arisen.
The bottom line for this debate and the conclusive answer is that if the organization is large, then there can be a foundation that caters to the specific purpose of philanthropic activities.
The examples of the Infosys Foundation and the Azim Premji Foundation are among the well-known cases where separate foundations have been setup. On the other hand, if corporate philanthropy is done on a smaller and individual scale where the corporates reach out to initiatives rather than causes, then the function can be part of the corporate communications function.
Though corporate philanthropy and direct marketing are as different as chalk and cheese, nonetheless the commonality between the two has to do with corporate communications handling both these activities. This is because essentially both entail reaching out to the external world and since this is the function of corporate communications, it is included in their list of activities. Finally, with increasing complexity as well as large numbers of activities being part of these two functions, many organizations either are outsourcing these activities or are setting up exclusive departments to handle them.
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Introduction to Corporate Communication: Need and its Importance
February 12, 2025
