Letter To Shareholders And Corporate Image Building

Corporate image is well-recognized as one of the most important factors in corporation development. It attracts great attention from both business and academic world. Among the researches of corporate image management, it is accepted that corporate communication is a vital process in building corporate image from corporate philosophy. Corporate communication includes the communication in the corporation, between corporations and between the corporation and the public or other stakeholders. Corporate communication, in the form of business discourse, is designed according to the communicatee. Letter to shareholders, as corporate communication or business discourse, is the carrier of corporate image built before shareholders by the corporation. In an attempt to make clear about how the corporate communication, basically in the form of business discourse, functions in corporate image building, this thesis will conduct a functional discourse analysis on the Letter to Shareholders of Google2012. Through the study, it is found that the language of this letter to shareholder is rigorous and the letter builds before investors an active, confident, reliable and visionary corporate image. Such an image actually does not conform to the Google’s free corporate image built among publics. It can be a response to that before different stakeholders the corporation can build different corporate images for different purposes.In business practice, more and more listed companies in China can be inspired by this research in writing letter to shareholders and further plan different corporate images in front of different stakeholders under a united corporate image system. In specific, in the composition process of these business discourses, the writers can keep being aware of the language devices related to corresponding corporate image. From the academic point of view, this research adds one more link between business disciplines and linguistics under Business Discourse Study. Letter to shareholders, as an important corporate communication in corporate image building aiming at investors and also as a business discourse, has been carefully studied by applying a functional discourse analysis. Such an approach of discourse analysis can be applied to the study of other corporate communication in the process of corporate image building.This thesis, by functional discourse analysis on the single case of Google or other corporate concepts, concludes a corporate image built through the Letter and finds it is different from the free corporate image of Google built among publics. However, two corporate images are results based on different bases, the former on functional discourse analysis and the latter on previous researches and data. Therefore, the future researches can further make comparative analysis on different corporate communications based on same bases and compare and contrast the corporate images generated correspondingly. Such an equivalent study can make a more accurate and more specific match between corporate image and linguistic features in corporate communication and further be an inspiration to the practical corporate image building in corporate communication.