Marketing Stakeholder Analysis Fundamentals

Stakeholder analysis is the identification and examination of marketing stakeholder interests, influences, expectations and attitudes as they relate to a project (e.g. rollout of a marketing automation platform, standardized marketing reporting or data quality initiative).

Its purpose is to understand the political and people-oriented aspects of the project environment, and the processes and functions that impact (or are impacted by) the project. The result is a better understanding of the stakeholders (e.g. interests, relationships), better decisionmaking and greater project acceptance by stakeholders.

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Print Me a Liver

There is a scene towards the end of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, where Captain Kirk, being hunted by Khan and out of necessity defending his crippled spacecraft, maneuvers it into a nebula that disables both ships defenses and navigation. Kirk makes the observation that Khan, unlike the starship crew, is accustomed to living only in a two dimensional world, previously confined to the planet’s surface, and likely does not have the perspective to think in the 3D manner required in outer space. So Kirk launches an attack from underneath Khan’s ship, correctly supposing that Khan is only thinking in the right/left and forward/backwards dimensions, and not in the up/down direction.

In the business world we too are often caught like Khan, unprepared for a strategic threat from outside of our particular domain and comfort zone.

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Why We Love and Hate Models

A model is meant to be a simplified representation of reality created for a specific purpose. We often try to build models to understand the flow and interactions between different parts of a system or predict certain outcomes. Think of a map used to navigate from point A to point B. Although it may not include every street, it shows some of the main paths to follow to get to point B, which is what we need.

Models need to rely on assumptions that don’t always apply perfectly to reality. This frustrates many of us, and even makes us wonder why we use models if they rely on faulty assumptions.

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Knowledge Squared

I was born in the Atomic Age, grew up in the Space Age, was first employed during the Computer Age, but what will likely outlast them all in relevancy is what we tend to call in these post-modern times the Information Age. What I learned in business and economics courses in college during that Computer Age was that there were four factors of production: Capital, labor, management and raw materials/land. What I think we will learn in this next age is that we were missing one – information. Up until now we’ve treated information as an asset, a subset of the other four perhaps - a little bit of capital, raw material, management and labor combined together. What we are learning is that information itself may be a bedrock principle of modern economics and society. There is even now the holographic theory of the universe – that the universe is just one big quantum computer and that it’s ALL about the information flows.

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Baking and Computers, a Surprising History of Analytics Pioneers

Perhaps surprisingly, bakers have a history of being analytics pioneers, from the first business application ever to the latest in-memory technology.

In 1951, the J. Lyons company, famous for their tea-shops throughout the UK, built and used the LEO “Lyons Electronic Organizer” computer they had built to run the very first business application ever: bakery valuations.

[And], it wasn’t just the first business application, it was also the first example of actionable, computer-powered analytics and business intelligence.

How’d that happen?

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