Strategic Communication with Multiple Audiences: Polyphony, Text Stakeholders, and Argumentation

Abstract

ABSTRACT In today’s complex and hyper-digital environments, organizations and social actors need to deal with multiple audiences when designing public messages. This makes strategic communication markedly polyphonic as various voices, corresponding to different stakeholders, must be managed within a single communication. This article develops a conceptual framework combining linguistic theories of discourse polyphony with a stakeholder-based model of rhetorical audiences (the Text Stakeholder Model). The proposed approach allows to reconstruct micro-level communication strategies consisting in arguments adapted to a multiple audience demand. To showcase the proposed method, the article examines, as a case study, an open letter to CEO, which represents a polyphonic genre of financial communication, as the authors formally direct their discourse to the addressed CEO while conveying arguments to other text stakeholders, who participate as unaddressed audiences. The case study identifies patterns of argumentative strategies signaled by polyphony markers such as negations, pronouns, and concessive clauses. These strategies are not necessarily based on ambiguity, suggesting that the presence of multiple audiences can accommodate a variety of discursive strategic resources. The study contributes to current research in strategic communication that focuses on the analysis and assessement of message strategy and on the micro-level dynamics of strategic communication.