Consumer campaigns in corporate public affairs management

Abstract

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to use expert interviews with communication managers of the German energy industry to analyze the strategic aims and challenges of consumer campaigns as a relatively new phenomenon in German public affairs management. The analysis is based on structuration theory, which is used as a theoretical framework. This framework helps to conceptualize the different logics of action within non-public and public paths of public affairs management, their stakeholders and respective instruments. Design/methodology/approach -Expert interviews with German public affairs managers from multinational and regional energy corporations as well as industry associations were conducted regarding their communication in the context of climate regulation. Based on this data, the study reconstructs manager's strategic considerations about why to engage in consumer campaigns, and analyses the challenges they see with them, and the strategies they employ to handle these. Findings -Managers perceive the importance of the public path of regulative intervention as growing along with a strong media orientation of political authorities. Against this backdrop they describe the bypassing of critical journalists and the engaging of critical individuals and minorities as the strategic aims of consumer campaigns. They portray a lack of credibility as the main challenge of such campaignsand relativising the corporation's societal efforts as well as allowing public critique as most promising strategies to handle this challenge. Originality/value -The contribution of the study is twofold: first, it adds to the scientific analysis of consumer campaigns as a rather new phenomenon in German public affairs management. Second, practitioners may utilize the results as impulses for their own communicative strategies in the context of public affairs management.

Assessing ExxonMobil’s climate change communications (1977–2014)

“…By bringing to bear the quantitative methodologies of consensus measurement [22,23] and content analysis [24][25][26][27][28], our results add to (i) earlier analyses of ExxonMobil's communication practices [19,20,[29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36], (ii) qualitative accounts of the company's AGW communications [17,18,[37][38][39], and (iii) the application of consensus measurement/content analysis to AGW communications [26-28, 40, 41]. In addition, this study contributes to the broader literature on climate change denial [42][43][44][45][46][47][48], corporate issue management [21,35,49,50] and misinformation strategies [51][52][53][54][55], and the social construction of ignorance [56][57][58].…”

Aligning Adverse Activities? Corporate Social Responsibility and Political Activity

“…These theoretical lenses assume that the role of CEOs (as well as corporate boards and top-management teams) is most important. There are indications, however, that CSR managers (Wickert & de Bakker, 2016) and public affairs managers (Schlichting, 2014) may play distinct and important roles, too; they are after all, the ones working on the actual alignment (or not!) within their organizations.…”

Argumentation strategies in lobbying: toward a typology

“…For this paper, lobbying is understood within its wider strategic communication context and as a tool of public affairs practice. When referring to lobbying, the paper is indicating communications directly with institutional policy-makers and elected legislators (Kugler, 2004), as opposed to outside advocacy where wider public opinion arguments are targeted (Schlichting, 2014; Ihlen et al ., 2022). Drawing on the definition by the European Union (European Commission, 2020) for its transparency register, lobbying constitutes activities related to meetings, events and making direct contact with policymakers and legislators; participation in public consultations; and the production and distribution of position papers and briefings.…”