At the dawn of legal theory, the Romans established a foundational premise: a binding agreement requires two clear, free, and concurrent declarations of will—an offer and an acceptance. This ancient concept, still enshrined across dozens of articles in our civil codes, represents the earliest formal recognition of communication as the cornerstone of commerce. Everything in business ultimately distills down to human relationships mediated through language.
While financial science governs capital exchanges and engineering optimizes production efficiency, all corporate disciplines converge on a single ultimate objective: the transaction. And transactions are fundamentally communicative.
Misunderstanding this reality leads to two major strategic errors: dismissing communication as a superficial byproduct of customer irrationality, or treating it as a manipulative art of pushing unwanted goods via massive ad spend. Modern multidisciplinary insights—from sociology to Antonio Damasio’s neurophysiological work on human rationality—reveal that economic decisions are never cold mathematical computations. They are deeply emotional and contextual choices driven by human survival, pleasure, and meaning. When a consumer buys a chemical compound named “SuperPop” instead of generic bleach, they are responding to a shared narrative, not a literal formula.
Corporate communication is therefore the humble art of establishing a common ground—the literal etymology of communicare, to put in common. It is the mechanism through which an enterprise makes its human rationale heard, selling the reasons for a product before selling the product itself.
Far from a superficial add-on, communication is an ideological and technical function that must be directly anchored to management. It exists to drive measurable value creation and capture, bridging the gap between corporate intent and consumer perception. Companies that embrace this pragmatism shed parochial arrogance, recognizing that a corporate entity is not just a legal fiction, but a living network of human perceptions woven together by language.
Paulo Fidalgo
CEO of Marketividade
