Corporate Communication and Media: Theory meets Practice

Time has flown by because week three of the academy is already over. This week was all about brainstorming, working in our individual groups and putting our first ideas together for a strategy for Fairphone. We also had individual consultation sessions with our group with either Lotte or Shelly to test our ideas, ask questions and receive feedback on our draft strategy. It felt as if we were switching up a gear. Thing were getting serious.

During the plenary session, we were immersed in some theory again by Noortje and Monique. The session of this week focused on corporate communication and media. After a short introduction, Noortje walked us through what corporate communication is, and we tackled the question how to transfer corporate stories into campaigns. It was very useful to dive deeper into the topic. Noortje shared useful cases, real-life examples and anecdotes which made corporate communication really tangible and understandable. We also discussed what Fairphone’s corporate story would be. This was a useful exercise for the next step in our case, namely developing a campaign.

In our break we caught up with the group and, as we do every week, enjoyed a nice warm meal offered by Coopr. As this was the third week, we are acting more and more as a team. We use the break to discuss all kinds of things and get to know each other even better.

After the break, Monique kicked off the session with the question what is media and how to get a mix of various media that is aligned. We looked at the different phases of news output, media relations and how to create news as an organization. We further explored how companies can handle crisis communication and were provided with very compelling crisis communication cases. Learning how companies can handle information that is not positive, and even damaging the image or sentiment, or information that isn’t correct or true. Monique finalized the session with information about media training, giving us insight into how to handle media and to do a good interview with media representatives. What do you want to say and how do you say it?

What made the sessions of this week extremely valuable was the wealth of experience, real life cases and examples Noortje and Monique shared with us. This made the theory come alive and made us realize how we could apply it in our daily work and of course our own Fairphone case.

Time to dive into next week’s assignment, deciding on a media approach for the launch of the Fairphone 4, and keep ourselves busy with the question what media targets we would choose and what we would offer them.