Corporate Communication and Public Relations

To understand the role of communication as a strategic management tool to build, develop, manage and protect the company's reputation.
By the term "company" the course considers private or public organizations, n.g.o., institutions, associations, third parties etc.
To know the basic elements of the corporate communication discipline: processes, methodologies, tools and methods to implement effective communications responding to the organization's goals while determining the pursuit of its business objectives and results, maintaining consistency with the company's positioning and values.
The Public Relations discipline is specifically approached through a specific in-depth analysis, as an essential modality for managing efficiently and effectively the company's relations with its different key external and internal interlocutors (stakeholders) and recipients of business communication.
Furthermore, the course correlates and systemises all the knowledges and principles already acquired by the student during other courses (such as, for example, marketing, advertising, digital communication, human resources, etc.) including them in more complex strategies of business communication.
All this, considering the changes and the evolution of the scenarios in terms of companies and organizations, consumer / customer / user / citizen, distribution (stores and networks), associations, access to technologies and the digital world.
The course program is divided into the following macro topics:
-Communication as a strategic management tool to affirm the company's values and culture, during constantly changing scenarios (from the company's vision as the centre of the world to the individual centric vision).
-Communication as a carrier of internal and external company's relations, depending on the scenarios' evolution and the development of the role of the influential interlocutors for the company and, in general, of the "enlarged" society.
-The process of defining and affirming the distinctive communication positioning of the company and the brand: consistency and integration between the various communication disciplines.
-Identity and corporate personality - visibility and image - corporate reputation.
-Definition and transmission of the company's mission and guiding values, internally and in the world surrounding it.
-The different branches of business communication: corporate, product, internal / organizational, public affairs, lobbying, financial, issue management (preparedness planning - crisis communication), social responsibility, business to business.
-The diffusion of digital technologies and the impact they have on business communication, also in terms of disintermediation.
-Word of mouth marketing (not only in the digital environment).
-The evolution of civil society: Sustainability - Corporate Social Responsibility - Cause Related Marketing.
-Criteria and methods to measure and evaluate the company's communication and reputation.

Two intermediate tests (half and at the end of the course) have the role to mainly evaluate:
­at the first, the knowledge of the discipline's basic elements (corporate communication and public relations) including the discipline's terminology correct utilization;
­then the verification of the student's critical abilities in using the knowledge learned from the texts and during the lessons, as well as having the elements to deal effectively with practical-professional issues for a communicator.
The formulation of the tests and the topics dealt with in them intends to verify particularly the candidate's critical ability in reworking the theoretical-practical contents acquired during the course.
Also the practical exercise required during the course (realization of a Communication Audit of an organization chosen by the student but agreed with the teacher) has the further purpose of putting to the test the analytical, synthesis and proposal skills whose fundamentals are been addressed during the lessons.