Conference Agenda

The paper aims to establish a trust-building model for enhancing the perception of trustworthiness among emerging brands and startups in Brazil, where trust levels are at an unprecedented low. The importance of building consumer trust is emphasized, particularly for new businesses lacking an established reputation. The proposed model incorporates cognitive and affective aspects to overcome this challenge. Communication for perceived trust in public relations is guided by formative measurements rooted in brand identity and externalized through brand image, design, and communication across all customer experience touchpoints. The trust-building model proposed by this study provides startups and emerging brands with insights on establishing trust and cultivating a positive reputation with customers through strategic communication efforts, ultimately leading to a perception of trustworthiness among consumers.

This paper introduces a narrative approach to stakeholder analysis. We argue that its introduction is needed because of the post-truth era we live in, where basic assumptions, sources, and facts differ across stakeholders. Furthermore, we argue that existing frameworks have overlooked the discursive processes of stakeholder systems and the benefits that their observation can provide in analysing them. To support our claims, we provide both conceptual and empirical evidence, drawing on the 5G case. Specifically, we illustrate how narrative analysis can facilitate three fundamental steps of stakeholder analysis: stakeholder identification, understanding, and prioritization. A narrative approach enhances stakeholder identification by allowing them to emerge organically from the narratives surrounding the issue. It also enables a better understanding of stakeholder, by bringing forward their sentiments and goals. Lastly, it also helps prioritization of stakeholders by illustrating existing relationships in the system and characterizing them. Our paper concludes with a discussion of how a narrative approach to stakeholder analysis responds to open questions in the literature, including the need for a systemic approach to stakeholder analysis, the reintroduction of the public sphere concept in stakeholder thinking, and a framework for approaching stakeholders in the post-truth era.

Co-orientation is a communicative process by which people align their actions toward a certain level of agreement in order to coordinate collective activities. Successful co-orienting links groups of people representing different interests, perspectives and worldviews.

In the case of a multi-stakeholder network of heterogeneous actors the challenge arises how one achieves co-orientation instead of working against each other, given the diverse perspectives and interests. The case at hand is a multi-stakeholder partnership of agricultural entrepreneurs with conflicting views on how to proceed in transforming the food system toward sustainability.

A frame analysis is applied to the transcripts of the conversations, as well as an interaction analysis, in order to explore whether co-orientation occurred or not and if so, how this communicative process evolved in the multi-stakeholder meetings.

In this paper the notion of ‘communicative co-orientation’ is introduced, by which this study fills a gap in the literature. It enriches co-orientation theory by emphasizing the dynamic character of co-orientation and by discerning the interactional strategies (on the micro level of interpersonal communication) that change the co-orientation state.

Furthermore, this study places the concept of co-orientation in the 21^st-century context of grand challenges and inter-organizational collaborations. Developing sustainable solutions to complex problems such as climate change involves re-negotiations of existing ways of working and settled institutions.

The research contributes to scientific knowledge on communicative co-orientation and interactional framing dynamics, but as well the study aspires to empower communication practitioners who are called to reinvent their profession in the face of grand challenges.