Typology of corporate publications

A corporate publication is a publication of commercial enterprises, state and municipal authorities, institutions and public organizations that forms and reflects the corporate consciousness, and contains information about the activities of the organization in order to create its positive image. In the article, corporate publication is considered in a broad sense: it includes all publishing products, including periodicals, websites, social media accounts, mobile applications as kinds of a corporate online publication. A corporate publication as a type is a phenomenon with a complex heterogeneous structure, and its elements are relatively isolated. Their diversity depends on their genesis, because modern corporate publications combine different traditions: the Russian tradition of publishing anniversary books, which arose during the period of industrialization of the economy at the end of the 19th century, and the Western practice of publishing corporate publications, borrowed in the early 2000s. In view of this, the problem of the typological characteristics of modern corporate publications is particularly acute. The variety of forms and types of corporate publications make it inefficient to use existing classification schemes developed, for example, by the Russian Book Chamber (GOST 7.0.60–2020), corporate media theorists (L.S. Agafonov, D.A. Murzin, E.I. Mordovskaya, Yu.V. Chemyakin, A.Yu. Gorcheva, V.A. Puzakova) and bibliologists (A.A. Grechikhin, I.G. Morgenshtern, A.A. Belovitskaya). The historically established types of corporate publications – anniversary book, corporate report, employee book, brand book – are the largest, nuclear, though specific types, combining in their concept the original functional purpose, target audience and periodicity. Therefore, in order to analyze existing publications and design the concept of new corporate publications, I propose a general typological model of a corporate publication based on the typology of GOST 7.0.60–2020 and taking into account the experience of modern publishing, which can be useful both to book theorists (for the GOST edition) and practitioners (customers, editors of corporate publications, PR managers of companies). The proposed general typological model of a corporate publication combines a typological approach and a classification scheme. It is based on three typical criteria (belonging to the customer; performing the image function and the function of corporate culture formation; compliance of the target audience with the object of influence of the organization), main (functional purpose, target audience, frequency) and secondary (nature of information, design and technical characteristics, degree of originality, degree of participation of the organization) features. Their combination makes it possible to design unique corporate publications based on a request, and not on the rule of conformity to type (in this case, an intraspecific, historically established typology is implied).

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