Communications are key to creating, maintaining and strengthening trust between businesses and stakeholders. Katia Pianezze – Communication Head & Executive Assistant Managing Director in SUANFARMA Italia tells us about her role in this interview.
What are the main objectives of corporate communications and how do you integrate them into your daily activities?
The Communication function is a fundamental lever for creating, maintaining and strengthening the trust that is established between the company and its stakeholders. It encompasses all the different communication activities implemented by the company: from internal to external communication. Its main task is to create a uniform image on all the channels used to make the company brand known and thus be able to control the effect it has on its stakeholders as effectively as possible while improving its image and credibility. It, therefore, becomes essential to implement a series of activities to disseminate both the identity and the values of the company itself, in order to make it clear to all the various stakeholders what the company’s objectives are, how it intends to achieve them and, above all, why it has undertaken them. This can only be achieved if the communication strategy adopted at the company level is uniform, clear and consistent in all its aspects.
How has your job evolved in time and which is the role that social media play in corporate communication?
Social media has revolutionized our businesses in a tremendous way: it has changed the way we interact. They have led us to spend more and more time connected and this, as a consequence, has also changed the way companies interact with their stakeholders.
Before social media, there were basically two types of communication: mass media and F2F interaction between people. What fundamentally differentiates social media from the usual mass media, however, is the fact that with the latter there is no active interaction whatsoever. Social media, on the other hand, allow active participation by the person, who can in turn make an active contribution to the conversation. In recent years, therefore, the role of the communicator has also changed: it is no longer necessary to focus exclusively on the content to be published, but it is absolutely necessary to think about how to stimulate and ensure that it is the stakeholders themselves who create this content, the important thing is to avoid the famous greenwashing and ensure that the content and values that are shared are true, concrete and authentic.
What do you like about your job?
Dealing with Communication within a structured company like ours allows me to deal on a daily basis with all the issues I mentioned in the previous questions and this makes my job highly challenging and motivating. It is not easy to keep up with the times but that is what makes my job exciting.
Which future challenges do you see in corporate communication and how will you
address them?
I believe that the main challenge is to be able to anticipate the times and foresee changes not only in the market but also in the society in which we live. But not only that, acting with
transparency and ethical sense, putting social responsibility at the top of corporate targets is another of the main objectives that will see our company engaged in the near future and perhaps this is the key to success that will allow companies, like ours, to remain competitive in an increasingly challenging market. I am, in fact, convinced that a company’s success depends on its attractiveness and the consensus and trust it manages to gain from its stakeholders.
Three words to describe SUANFARMA Italy
Tenacious: we have been on the market for over 40 years, we have lived through perhaps the most challenging socio-economic and financial context of recent years, and managing to remain productive while guaranteeing the high quality of our products has not always been easy, but thanks to the tenacity of the people who work within SF Italia we have managed to overcome this challenge, guaranteeing totally Made in Italy products.
Innovative: it is not just a matter of being at the forefront of technology; being innovative means being able to create a corporate culture permeated by innovation, involving every corporate function. At SF Italia we are doing this every day, and the results obtained to date are confirmation that the path taken is the correct one.
Courageous: if innovation is part of our DNA, it is thanks to the courage that SF Italia has shown over the years: we have dared to rethink and revise all our production processes and guidelines, and this has allowed us not only to remain competitive in an increasingly challenging market but also to guarantee all our customers high-quality products.
