CommunicationControlCockpit (Rolke)

1. Definition
CommunicationControlCockpit (CCC) is an indicator system intended to enable measurement of the correlations between communication performance, image value and corporate success. The main item is the company's image values among various stakeholders and optimization of communicative effect correlations affecting corporate success. The aggregate image values of the various stakeholders are expressed in terms of EVA and communications budget and the results are used to calculate indicators such as return on image, communicative efficiency and return on communications.

2. Applications
The starting point of the system is: long-term corporate success is based on the enterprise's ability to create cooperation benefits with the relevant stakeholders. As such, the company's image / reputation are seen to be the main drivers of the value addition process. Key issues are: what contributes to which costs on image/reputation (input side) and what monetary value contribution does the image thus created provide in terms of corporate success (output side). In finding an answer, CCC focuses on the four target groups of customers (sales market), shareholders and analysts (finance market), employees (purchasing market) and media (acceptance market). The goal is to make image building in the four stakeholder relationships visible through the use of suitable indicators (operations side) and combine them meaningfully with monetary indicators to facilitate value-adding control (strategic side).

3. Conduct
The first step is to identify image indicators for each of the four stakeholder relationships and combine them by multiplication as image values on the following levels:

• Customers: effects describable in content terms (e.g. customer satisfaction, further recommendation rate) and intensity (e.g. direct customer experience, contact frequency)
• Public: public opinion (quantitative and qualitative media response analysis) and direct communication (multipliers)
• Employees: employee quality and commitment
• Shareholders: public-image-enhancing support and profit generated.

The ImEx index created by combining image values is expressed in relation to economic value added (EVA) and capital employed (budget). This gives three strategic indicators showing how the business organization can be controlled on the basis of value: value-value ratio (V2R), return on communications (RoCom) and communications efficiency (CommEf). V2R, RoCom and CommEf  constitute the principles of communicative process control in CCC. Strategic indicators may be added.

4. Indicators

• ImEx (Image Index): a company's total image value
• V2R (value-value ratio): ratio of image or reputation value of a company and economic value added (EVA).
• RoCom (Return on Communications): ratio of corporate value created (economic value added, EVA) to communication budget employed, which is composed in turn of the individual budgets for advertising, PR, direct marketing investor relations, etc.
• CommEf (communications efficiency): ratio of ImEx to communication budget.

5. Service providers in Germany
Rolke is currently collaborating with maasen + partner on the development of software designed to support business organizations in implementing CCC.

6. Links

7. Further reading

8. Case studies