Finding the Right Corporate Message Isn’t Always Easy<br />It was 2013, and Ms. Kuryk — who had just left her post as the national finance director of the Democratic National<br />Committee — was at Condé Nast seeking career advice from the well-connected Vogue editor in chief.<br />Instead, Ms. Kuryk soon found herself back at Condé Nast, no longer looking for a job<br />but serving as Vogue’s director of communications, and the media gatekeeper to Ms. Wintour (who doubles as the artistic director of Condé Nast).<br />“There’s huge demand right now for professionals who can teach businesses how to navigate these new consumer expectations<br />and for corporations to take stances on political issues and practice good corporate social responsibility,” said Kara Alaimo, associate professor of public relations at Hofstra University.<br />That’s not in dispute,” Ms. Kuryk, 40, said during a recent interview in the office she now rents from Condé Nast at 1 World Trade Center.<br />Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to sell trucks, to the criticism (by, among others, Chance the Rapper) of<br />Heineken’s series of commercials for its light beer and the tagline, “Sometimes, Lighter Is Better.”<br />“The Pepsi and Kendall Jenner thing — I was tearing my hair out,” Ms. Kuryk said.<br />The second is to reinvent the concept of corporate social responsibility by integrating it into every aspect of a company’s management,<br />and not shunt it off, she said, to “a separate office down the hall.”<br />Partly because of the reach of social media, partly<br />because of a new era of civic engagement (some of it in response to the polarizing first year of the Trump administration), corporations are increasingly embracing message-based marketing.
