• Apply theories, models, best practices and the various tools (traditional and social media) associated with persuasion and external communication in business contexts.
• Demonstrate strategic insight to help uncover and analyze competitive or stakeholder problems that could be alleviated/moderated with persuasive external communication.
• Recognize the extent that consumers now scrutinize companies on issues well beyond products/services and how external communication can heighten customer satisfaction.
• Understand that business success increasingly hinges on how a company communicates its values through CSR, issues management and stakeholder relations.

From Roman times when Julius Caesar issued battlefield reports to influence public opinion to the current Apple age when Steve Jobs transformed the telephone, external communication has been an essential building block of successful organizational endeavors. Arguably, the classic underlying principles of persuasive external communication have been largely the same for thousands of years. Today, however, sweeping cultural changes and dramatic advances in technology clearly have heightened the persuasive stakes and the reliance on external communication as never before. With stakeholder empowerment and corporate transparency at unprecedented levels due to globalization and the advent of social media, the role of the external communicator has become increasingly top-level corporate strategist rather than the once more narrowly defined publicist. 

This course looks at how businesses today excel (or stumble) based on how well they understand of the widening power and reach of persuasion across global, national and local levels.  It explores how organizations seek to persuade stakeholders through an expanded range of external communication strategies and tactics to help manage ongoing issues, avert or moderate controversies and crises and, more day-to-day, develop and maintain welcoming markets for their products and services. Significant attention in this course is focused on corporate social responsibility initiatives as consumers now are increasingly likely to consider “who you are” as a corporate contributor to society, rather than simply what you have to sell. 

A Preliminary Assignment and a Feedback Activity are required; both aim to further student insight and engagement from lectures, readings and other aspects of the course.

Preliminary Assignment: To help students get maximum value from ISUP courses, instructors provide a reading or a small number of readings or video clips to be read or viewed before the start of classes with a related task scheduled for class 1 in order to 'jump-start' the learning process.

Feedback Activity: A feedback activitity defined by the course instructor will take place app. half-way through the course. 
 

The timetable is available on  http://www.cbs.dk/files/cbs.dk/isup_timetable_2016_updated.pdf

Required Text: 

"Good Works! Marketing and Corporate Initiatives that Build a Better World ... and the Bottom Line". Available for purchase at CBS Bookstore

Required Coursepack:

Available for online purchase from Harvard Business Publishing

Use link: http://cb.hbsp.harvard.edu/cbmp/access/49409993

Coursepack articles include:

•”Harnessing the Science of Persuasion,” HBR's 10 Must Reads on Communication

•”Telling Tales,” HBR's 10 Must Reads on Communication

• ”Tools and Techniques for External Corporate Communication,” Corporate Communication

•”Fiji Water and Corporate Social Responsibility -Green Makeover or 'Greenwashing'?,”Ivey/Western University;

•"Marketing Meets Web 2.0, Social Media, and Creative Consumers: Implications for International Marketing Strategy” (Kelley/Indiana University)