Specialisation has become the province of communications. Steve Doswell on existential debate, brand names and root vegetables

From time to time, the world of internal communication likes to indulge in existential debates about what we do. Now, some argue that that there is nothing distinct about the IC environment, that communication is communication regardless of its internal or external setting. Either they take a ‘theological’ view that internal communication is essentially a facet of public relations in its pure sense of relations with publics. Or they believe that former distinctions have been blurred to the point of irrelevance by the advent of social media and related technologies which have irrevocably broken down the barriers between ‘outside’ and inside’ organisations.

I understand both positions and yet for me, IC remains distinctive because it’s about specialisation. To advocate that IC is special is to claim that there are distinctions in the disposition of an internal community that create specific conditions, require particular insights and demand specially adapted communication tools. This is not unique in professional practice. In the legal profession there are criminal lawyers, family lawyers, commercial lawyers. It’s all ‘law’ but begin to specialise and you face what institutional scholars would call path dependency. The more you specialise in one, the more developments take place in other branches and the more distanced you become from them. Such is the growth in knowledge in all spheres that it becomes increasingly harder to be a generalist.

So I don’t claim that IC is an entirely different beast from other branches of communication but it is a hybrid – contemporary IC draws from HR practices, from OD, from change management, as well as from traditional sources of communication skills, notably journalism and PR. By being a little of all of those, it becomes something distinct in its own right. By requiring its practitioners to become conversant in these hybrid practices and drawing them ever further down a distinct and dependent path, it makes it progressively harder for a generalist to dabble. That is how specialisms develop and why people choose to follow one branch of a broader professional practice than another.

Call this perverse after what I’ve just said but I’ll end this month’s column with an observation that clearly transcends the internal- external threshold: brand names. This came to mind on a recent Staffordshire motorway journey. At one end of the spectrum is the meticulous quest for names that will resonate across cultural boundaries. Think of Mondeléz, a carefully engineered confection of sounds that convey ‘world’ and ‘delight,’ in many parts of the world for this global food-and- snack conglomerate. Some such names will stand the test of time, others won’t: during the Post Office’s last attempt at a new identity, the proposed name proved unpopular with employees and public alike (no distinction there) and was Consignia-ed to the history of failed rebrands.

The vogue for vivid and playful agency names has created a five-a-day fruit-bowl at the end of the rainbow, from top banana to scarlettabbott, from beetroot (OK, that’s a vegetable, but one that’s rich in colour) to theblueballroom. Then there are those often artless business names that leave no room for doubt about their owners or their purpose. One I saw displayed in bold, bright type on the side of an artic lorry gave me pause to reflect on how little professional input is sometimes needed in order to call things what they are.

So I leave you with a name that’s earthy, clear and utterly devoid of pretension: ‘Mike’s Potatoes.’

Steve Doswell is chief executive of the Institute of Internal Communication You can find him on Twitter @stevedoswell