Fieldwork: October / November 2011
The Business Leaders in Communications Study 2012 (BLCS 2012) commissioned by VMA Group, the international resourcing specialist for corporate communications, surveyed 95 Directors of Communications in leading FTSE organisations about their corporate communications function. The results provide the most comprehensive overview of the function, structure and role of corporate communications today and in the future.
Participants included: BP, GlaxoSmithKline, IHG, Hammerson, Rolls-Royce, AMEC plc, AstraZeneca, Aviva, BT, Deutsche Bank, Diageo plc, GlaxoSmithKline, The John Lewis Partnership, Lloyds Banking Group, McKinsey and Company, Novartis and PwC. The research was designed, hosted and managed by Mediatrack Research.
The results reveal that senior communicators expect their influence to increase over the next two years, yet they currently report only moderate influence at board level. It also reveals an expected increase in demand but decrease in budgets over the next two years.
Other headlines findings include:
- Nearly two in three communications professionals see reputation management as their main function, while media relations and advising the board on business strategy were both equal second. However, only three per cent of respondents saw protecting or enhancing the reputation of the CEO as their main role.
- Forty-one per cent had a seat on the board or management executive and two thirds of respondents reported into the CEO; one in ten to the HR Director and just seven per cent to the Marketing Director.
- Eighty-one per cent of respondents said that their CEO and the board thought communication to be critically important. But that figure fell to 59% when applied across the business. A significant minority (18%) said communications was not critically important in the organisation.
- More than one in three (37%) CEOs spend at least one day a week on communications activity, and one in twenty spend more than two days. The proportion of CEO time devoted to communications is particularly high in the financial services sector (22%), possibly an indication of the continued fallout from the banking crisis.
- The statistics around the ownership of the digital space raise the possibility that we may be seeing the beginning of a decline in influence for marketing departments as we currently know them.
