YOU ARE THE IMAGE OF THIS CORPORATION

A few years ago, I had the chance of being hired as Communications Director (Corporate Image Director was the  position’s real name)  in a private university, and I accepted,  considering it a interesting challenge in my professional career.

The first problem that I’ve found was the name of the position, it should be Communications Director instead of Corporate Image Director. I told my employers that they must change the name immediately because the image is consequence of the communication work, not the work itself. I also told them that term was obsolete and only a few institutions still call their communications department that way.

They answered that they would do that, but it would take time because they would have to change legal statutes. I felt satisfied with the answer and began to work.

A couple of months later I started to realize that some funny things were happening to my job: I spent most of the time attending endless meetings, escorting authorities to official ceremonies, making welcome speeches to the new workers, or addressing audiences with news, which was not exactly wrong, but not to occupy most of my time in that kind of activities.

I was rarely commissioned to develop projects, conduct research, or diagnose the communication situation of the organization, things that are more executive and related to a strategic position like mine.

I began to worry, and to wonder why my employers gave more importance to operative things than the strategic ones, and one day I met with a Communication Teacher from another university and when I talked to him about my situation and asked what was going on, he answered me:

“It´s all in the name. When an organization chooses a name instead of another, it shows the way they understand the subject and their activities. Choosing Image instead of Communication is not a random thing, it has a whole series of implications”.

The explanation was not so clear to me, until one day I met a colleague, and he said to me:

“Why so serious? Smile, you are the image of this corporation”.

Suddenly everything made sense : their concept of a communication expert was a person who reflects the image of a company, not someone who helped build it thinking of its audiences. Someone who lends his face to that of the organization rather than helping them to show their own face.

Unfortunately this is not an atypical situation and is a sign of how many organizations still see communication. For them communication is always ancillary, not one of the primordial elements of an organization. They will never understand it.

As you may suppose I left the position in a short term and avoided any further discussion. Recently I read a statement from them and guess what: it was signed as Corporate Image Department.