Corporate Masks

Jonathan Peterson musing on corporate personae, writes

Corporations similarly have multiple personae, which are used in communicating depending on audience (shareholders, employees, partners, customers, etc.) The Cluetrain concept that those communications should be as human as possible doesn’t negate the need for a company to assume many different persona.

Definitely. And it’s hard to see why that should be even objectionable. I don’t want or expect the notice of the upcoming shareholders meeting to be written in the same voice as the tips newsletter or the corporate endorsement of City Year. The question — which Chris Locke raises sharply in Gonzo Marketing — is whether a corporation can have any authentic voice at all since it doesn’t have a self and doesn’t have a body. Is a corporation all masks and no cowboy? Or, are corporations in the real world distressingly similar to selves on the Web: all public personae without an inner core against which they can be measured as authentic or not?

Jonathan recommends Brenda Laurel’s Computers as Theatre, and asks her to write one on corporations as theatre. I just ordered Laurel’s book from Amazon; sounds fascinating. (Thanks, Jonathan.)

Categories: Uncategorized dw