tag archive: public relations

December 1, 2012

Intertextuality for Strategic Communication

By . Filed Under: Books & Films, Intercultural Communication, Marketing & Branding, Narrative forms, Popular Culture, Public Relations, Strategic Communication.

The Power of Reference, Allusion and Quotation in Communication

Two recent films, Skyfall and Anna Karenina, are made more intensely meaningful by their intentional intertextuality-their incorporation of previous iterations and interpretations of the story they are themselves telling. Both offer insights into the ways communicators can benefit from the same kind of internal referentiality.

The Concept of Intertextuality

Literary and linguistic theorists began to work with the concept of intertextuality in the mid-1960s, when theorist Julia Kristeva coined the term. Scholarly definitions have proliferated and grown increasingly technical in the intervening half century. For our purposes, the following definition works just fine: Intertextuality means that texts – novels, paintings, films, but also tax codes and thank you letters –gain meaning not through their reference to an external reality, but by their reference to pre-existing other texts. Intertextuality is not a choice, but rather an inevitable by- product of creating, because we are always creating into already existing histories, discourses and ways of interpreting. These existing frames have already partly shaped what we will produce and how it will be recieved. An author or an artist may intend to give us something original, but they can’t, fully. We readers, in turn, never have direct access to a work, but can only get at it by making our way through its prior iterations and interpretations.

James Bond and Anna Karenina are among the most iconic popular texts in modern Western culture. The James Bond series, which is the longest-running film series in history, has given us the rules by which we define spy thrillers. Anna Karenina is no longer only the Leo Tolstoy novel, but also the dozens of derivative films, ballets, operas and musicals that have been created since the late 19th century.

Both are completely enmeshed in our everyday language — we think things about ourselves through the mesh of their expressions:“Bond, James Bond,” and “Shaken, not stirred,”are shorthand invocations of suave masculinity. “All happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” has become a catch-all syntax for describing the singularity of just about anything, including in statistics, where the “Anna Karenina principle” is applied to ecological and economic puzzles.

Semiotics professor Daniel Chandler explains the implications of intertextuality: Continue reading

Posted in: Books & Films, Intercultural Communication, Marketing & Branding, Narrative forms, Popular Culture, Public Relations, Strategic Communication Tags: , , , , , , ,
August 30, 2011

Hurricane Irene News Coverage Pummels Viewers with Worst-Case Scenarios

By . Filed Under: Crisis Management, Decision making, News and Journalism, Public Relations.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:8.28.11IreneSunsetByLuigiNovi13.jpg

Union City, New Jersey, following Hurricane Irene's passage. Photographed by Luigi Novi under Creative Commons License

Turbocharged Reporting Underwhelmed Us

As we now know, the adrenalized coverage of Tropical Storm/Hurricane Irene as it traversed the U.S. East Coast overstated the risk of worst-case scenarios in a number of areas, like lower Manhattan and made them seem as if they were certain outcomes. In fact, hurricane modeling is not a perfectly predictive science. NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency, is explicit about how its annual hurricane outlooks are probabilistic, which means that potential events simply have some likelihood of occurring (and, in fact, there were areas such as Vermont where the potential for damage was under-forecasted)

I know I wasn’t alone in sensing that much of the media coverage was over the top. My relatives and friends, especially those of us in areas where the worst-case scenarios being put forth didn’t live up to the reality ended up feeling dismissive and irritated and, if we were frightened, slightly humiliated that we had been so easily spooked. I’m sure we’ll all wonder next time whether we should follow authorities’ most stringent instructions about emergency preparation.

When events don’t arrive in the dramatically bad proportions we’ve been expecting, we as likely to tune out authorities or forget entirely that the drama at hand was destructive weather, like the Washington DC woman who reported feeling that the milder than expected storm “”was a bit of a let down.”

The Challenge Communicating Uncertainty

On the other hand, there were also areas in which the degree of potential damage was under-forecast, as in Vermont. Continue reading

Posted in: Crisis Management, Decision making, News and Journalism, Public Relations Tags: , , , , ,
May 14, 2011

Strategic Narrative Definition

By . Filed Under: International Politics, Marketing & Branding, National Security, Public Relations.

There is no concrete thing in the world-like a granny smith apple, or a suspension bridge-to which the term “strategic narrative” refers. Nevertheless, there are an increasing number of mentions of this abstraction out there, which means that a shared definition is beginning to form in the collective minds of different groups, so perhaps we are due for a strategic narrative definition.

Existing literature and commentary, as per a Google search of the term, produces two different-if overlapping-definitions “strategic narrative.”

Strategic Narrative in International Relations

For one community, “strategic” refers to the original meaning of the term to refer to military and political objectives. In ancient Greek, “strategos” is a compound term that means commander or leader of an army. “Strategic” materials are items needed to prosecute a war. Strategy is a subdiscipline of military science that focuses on planning war.

As a result, a “strategic narrative” can be understood as the story that a nation must tell itself, and the world, to wage a war or to maintain its competitive advantage in the international system. This is what the term means in the widely circulating document, “A National Strategic Narrative, written by two members of the American military. Anne Marie Slaughter, who introduces the document, defines a strategic narrative in terms of the competitive interests of a nation.

A narrative is a story. A national strategic narrative must be a story that all Americans can understand and identify with in their own lives. America’s national story has always see-sawed between exceptionalism and universalism. We think that we are an exceptional nation, but a core part of that exceptionalism is a commitment to universal values – to the equality of all human beings not just within the borders of the United States, but around the world. We should thus embrace the rise of other nations when that rise is powered by expanded prosperity, opportunity, and dignity for their peoples.

In one definition, then, “strategic narrative” refers to the use of “narrative” as an element of (national) strategy. This definition can be used in other organizations grounded in developing strategy.

In other professional disciplines, however, the concept of narrative, rather than strategy, grounds the definition.

Strategic Narrative in Public Relations

In public relations and related communications fields, the concept of a vehicle that conveys a message or idea is basic. “Message” is a traditional way of referring to a communication vehicle, but whereas a message can be conveyed in a bullet point, a narrative-a story-requires action, and drama and engaging characters. The idea of narratives as a way of communicating with consumers, or voters, or other constituencies has become popular. There is an entire sub-field now called “narrative marketing,” in which PR firms try to drive business growth through a “story-based perspective” A Canadian firm called Narrative Advocacy Media uses the premise to guide their entire marketing, branding and PR practice.

A strategic narrative, for communication practitioners, is an organizational narrative that has been planned to convey strategically meaningful elements about the organization’s identity and intentions. Some firms use the term narrative without really meaning “story” but rather simply to mean a descriptive text that uses words, instead of numbers.

The national security and business and PR understanding of “strategic narrative” overlap in important ways. All of these disciplines understand that the stories we tell and enact-through processes and actions-in our lives as social, political, creatures, can either be random and unthought, or they can be strategic and we can map them to goals we would like to achieve, and create them as spaces to be shared with the publics and audiences we’d like to reach.

Posted in: International Politics, Marketing & Branding, National Security, Public Relations Tags: , , , , ,