Mastering crisis communication need of the hour for any leader or brand custodian: Mahul Brahma on his new book

What is the book all about? Who is the target audience?

The book captures the evolving role of communications in today’s corporate world. I have explored every aspect of communication, be it internal, external, media, or leadership. Role of communication has become critical in today’s world and so I thought it is important to have a book, a guide that can handle every facet of strategic communication holistically. This book is an elixir of almost two decades of experience, both as a senior editor and now as a communications leader as well as chief editor. 

The target audience comprises corporate leaders, CXOs, communicators, brand custodians as well as students of management and media. I have written the book in such a way so that both professionals as well as aspirants can use it to make effective communication and transform the effectiveness towards leading the growth story of the organisation.

You have written about creating mythic value with communication. Will you elaborate on that?

Anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss in his paper on the structural study of myth wrote that myths are still widely interpreted in conflicting ways: collective dreams, the outcome of a kind of aesthetic play, the foundation of ritual. Mythological figures are considered as personified abstractions, divinised heroes or decayed gods. Whatever the hypothesis, the choice amounts to reducing mythology either to an idle play or to a coarse kind of speculation.

So what makes myths timeless? The key behind the timelessness of a myth is that it embodies a contradiction. A myth lives on because it is a union of the opposite sides of the spectrum. So the objective is to create this mythic value with communication. First, one needs to identify the contradictions in the brand attributes and then craft an embodying story to accommodate both the contradictions. This will create the mythic value, which needs to be communicated to make the story timeless, just like a myth.

In this age of turbulent times, how critical is crisis communication?

These are the Covid Times that has hit the economy real hard. So this is the time of crisis and thus crisis takes centre-stage.

There are two types of crisis – one where the organisation is the only one impacted and the other where the industry or overall economy is impacted. The latter is an opportunity and not a crisis. In these tough times every bit of positive story that usually gets lost in the crowd gets prominence. And for the negative stories, it becomes a victim of the headwinds for which it is not directly responsible. So smart communicators make the best use of such crisis.

So mastering crisis communication has become the need of the hour for any communications leader or brand custodian. Small wonder, I have dedicated a chapter to crisis communications.

You have written that role of communication in the corporate world has transformed. Please elaborate on that.

Organisations are realising the power of communications in running a business. And strategy is the conduit that connects the overall organisational objectives with communication. This conduit plays a key role in making communication a key growth driver for an organisation. That’s why strategic communication is playing a critical role in penning the growth story across all industries. With the onset of digital media the role of communicators and brand custodians have become more and more challenging. However, the same challenge has given rise to an opportunity. It has increased the criticality of the role of communication and its need to be strategic as well as aligned to the overall growth of the organisation. Therefore, communication now plays a key strategic role in the corporate growth story.