In public relations work, attempts to centrally coordinate and manage information about German Siemens companies resulted in the founding of a “Central Office for Press Affairs” in February 1902. As a staff function, it reported directly to corporate management.

E. Neisser, head of the Central Office, was personally expected to cultivate relationships with editorial boards and journalists, write articles, and get them into the appropriate publications. Besides the job of channeling information to press representatives, the staff was also responsible for watching the media and placing company advertising. By contrast, the “Literary Office” (founded 1900) was in charge of gathering, processing and forwarding information about products and other technical achievements to the trade and scientific media.

The growing importance that the company assigned to the daily and business press is also evident from the requirement that individual employees’ publications now had to be cleared by the department manager. Publications that affected the work of multiple departments had to be submitted to a seven-member press committee of the managing board.

To intensify contact with the daily press, in 1922 an experienced outside journalist, Helmut Böttcher, took over as head of the Press Office. Corporate management took the announcement of his appointment as an opportunity to emphasize again that for the sake of a uniform, consistent presentation to the outside world, “all communications with editorial boards […] must be handled solely by the Press Office […].” In his capacity as head of the central Press Office, Böttcher also took over the editorship of the „Siemens Wirtschaftlichen Mitteilungen,“ (company scientific reports) which had been appearing since 1919 – the ancestor of today’s SiemensWorld.

The Press Office, which had reported to the “Wirtschaftspolitische Abteilung” (Business Policy Department) since 1917, remained in place into the 1960s. With the end of the postwar reconstruction era and the gradual transition from a seller’s market to a buyer’s market, corporate communications steadily gained in importance as a way of clearly distinguishing competing manufacturers and products. Or as Gerd Tacke, the first Chairman of the Managing Board of Siemens AG, said in retrospect, people began to realize “that some day the company’s public relations work would have to be ‘all of a piece.’”

That day came in July 1968. With the founding of the “Zentralstelle für Information” (Corporate Information Office) a central contact and information office was established for the first time in the company’s long history to provide media representatives and other interested members of the general public with technical, product, and business information from the entire company. As regional press and public relations work intensified and became more coordinated in Germany and internationally, the goal became to give the public a consistent, uniform, positive picture of the electronics corporation.

Sabine Dittler

Further reading