2014_02_26_COM_Angel-Alloza

The director general of the Corporate Excellence Foundation, Ángel Allozareflected in a talk with the students of Master's Degree in Political and Corporate Communication (MCPC) on the relationship between the reality of a company business, the way it communicates and its reputation: "Improving reputation means improving reality. Communication does not disguise the existing reality. You can only communicate positively with a positive reality". Therefore, for Alloza, the Dircom, as manager of intangibles, "becomes a generator of changes within the organization to achieve excellence". At final, "reputation has become a strategic asset for companies".

Ángel Alloza defined core topic as the success of organizations in their legitimacy and differentiation. The expert explained that with the current crisis of confidence it is essential to work so that businesses create and maintain their legitimacy: "There is an opportunity for those companies capable of reading the social context". On the other hand, he asserted that the core topic of differentiation is no longer in the products, "which are very similar", but in the brands and in the companies behind those products. This is why there is a current trend to strengthen corporate brands.

Alloza reflected that in many occasions when a business wants to update its brand, it is usually thought of "superficially, in a change of its logo or visual identity". However, the expert said that more important than the logo is the character of a business, its behavior with its customers, its attitudes and the way it does things. In final, the experience that an organization offers.

"We have to forget that the brand is a marketing asset. Branding is defining who we are, what we are here for and what we are excited about building," he said. Alloza said that this only happens when communication starts from within an organization, that is, from employees to the rest of the target audiences.

In this sense, the director general of Corporate Excellence assured that we are facing a great challenge in the communication of organizations because we have to get people to speak well of us without being the ones doing the talking: "How do we get employees to speak well of us, so that customers speak well of us to other potential customers?" Alloza clarified that this can only happen if there is a change in an organization's stakeholder map to prioritize employees and customers. To do this, the communication Departments must be content generators, specialists in story builders, where employees are the protagonists and their main disseminators.

Corporate Excellence is an ideas laboratory or think tank with ten years of experience in promoting the management brand and corporate reputation as a strategic resource for business excellence. The foundation's patrons include BBVA, La Caixa, Iberdrola, Repsol, Santander and Telefónica.