This book analyses how and why advertising, PR, and corporate and political communication make use of strategic ambiguity. This special quality of vagueness allows companies to talk about the relevance of ESG or governments to promise stability and prosperity without fully committing themselves, disappointing no one and securing every freedom. This book describes in detail the diverse practices of ambiguous strategic communication – and its opposite, strategic clarity – with many examples. For academics, it offers a detailed framework for describing and researching strategic ambiguity. For PR practitioners, it provides a toolbox for the use of strategic ambiguity. Lastly, it provides journalists with a means of recognizing and criticizing questionable strategic ambiguity.

This book is a translation of the original German edition “Die Flucht in die Ambiguität”. The translation was done with the help of an artificial intelligence machine translation tool. A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation.