STAKEHOLDER MAPPING – MARKETING THEORIES

 

STAKEHOLDER MAPPING – MARKETING THEORIES

Stakeholder Mapping

Welcome to this week's Marketing Theory post. This week we will look at how marketers use something called a stakeholder map or stakeholder mapping. Marketers use this technique to group all the stakeholders for their organization into three groups, Internal, Connected and External.

Too understand this model we first need to look at how a stakeholder is defined. In the official CIM course book – Stakeholder Marketing, stakeholders are defined as:

'Those persons and organizations that have an interest in the strategy of the organization. Stakeholders normally include shareholders, customers, staff and the local community.

From this definition we can see that a stakeholder is a person, persons or an organization that have an interest, effect and can be affected by what the organization does'.

This highlights why organizations need to be able to identify their stakeholders and also judge the level of power they hold to affect the decisions and outcomes of the organization.

A first step for any marketer is to create a generic stakeholder map. This map will include all the stakeholders for his or her organization with the organization at the center as can be seen by the image below.

Once this stage is of stakeholder mapping is done, the marketer should have a better understanding of who the stakeholders are for the organization. This in itself can highlight the impact of certain stakeholders on the organization that could have been overlooked in the past.

All of these stakeholders can then be placed into one of three broad categories:



Internal Stakeholders

Internal Stakeholders are usually members of the organization. The following are some examples of who these stakeholders might be:

  • Directors
  • Managers
  • Employees
  • Connected Stakeholders

Connected stakeholders, also called primary stakeholders, are those that have an economic or contractual relationship with the organization. Have a look at some the examples below:

  • Company shareholders
  • Customers
  • Distributors

External Stakeholders

External or secondary stakeholders are those who are not directly connected to the organization. These stakeholders will have an interest in the organizations activities or they might be impacted by the organizations activities in some way. Key examples:

  • Governments
  • Interest and pressure groups
  • Media and news organizations
  • Local Communities

It has to be said at this stage that grouping stakeholders in categories is useful but it would be a mistake to think of each stakeholder as an entirely separate entity or group. There is most often overlapping with the categories. For example – The organizations customers are also part of the wider community and they might also be shareholders or even employees.

The important point to take away from this theory is that any organization affects the environment that it operates in and at the same time is also affected by the environment.

Once you have identified all of the organization’s stakeholders you will want to establish the level of power and interest they have in and on the organization. There are a couple of models and theories that can help you on your way and we will look at these in the next post.

 

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