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Communications Strategy 105

This was done by re-conceiving how value might be provided to customers; an
inspiring and differentiated brand was developed that appealed to customer’s demand
for ‘upstream’ value.
The aim of strategic analysis is, then, to form a view of the key influences on the
present and future well-being of the organization, and what opportunities are
afforded by the environment and the competencies of the organization. In other
words, the objective with strategic analysis is to analyse and draw out what the
current position of the organization is with all stakeholders in its environment, and
what this means for the organization’s corporate, business unit or market and commu-
nications strategies. Such strategic analysis is rather broad-based, and may range from
analyses of the organization and its environment, to competitor and market analyses,
to stakeholder analysis.A range of analytical tools can be used here to make sense of
the organization’s position in the environment and the factors affecting its position.
With the use of these tools, strategic analysis should seek to arrive at (a) a clear
understanding of the external environment, particularly stakeholders and market
forces affecting the organization; and (b) a clear understanding of the organization’s
internal strengths, weaknesses, values and capabilities. In this way, strategic analysis
indicates in what way the organization should respond to its external environment,
and as such provides the input for the next phase of strategy making: strategic intent.
The different elements of strategic analysis and the analytical tools involved are
briefly discussed below.

1. Organization-environment analysis. The organization exists in the context of a com-
plex commercial, economic, political, technological, social and cultural world. This
environment changes and is more complex for some organizations than for others:
how this affects the organization could include an understanding of historical and
environmental effects, as well as expected or potential changes in environmental
variables.This is a major task because the range of variables is so great. Many of those
variables will give rise to opportunities and others will exert threats on the organization.
Whether environmental forces have such an impact on the organization depends
furthermore on how the organization itself, in terms of the strengths and weaknesses in
its values, resources and competencies, can respond to them.A problem that has to be
faced is that the range of variables is likely to be so great that it may not be possible
or realistic to identify and analyse each one; and therefore there is a need to distil out
a view of the main or overarching environmental impacts on the organization.Two
analytical tools can be used for this: DESTEP analysis and SWOT analysis.
A DESTEP analysis is a broad analysis of the various demographic, economic,
social, technological, ecological and political developments and factors that are
expected to have an impact upon the organization and its operations.This includes
a summation of factors, such as government regulation (political), that affect the
industry in which the organization operates, changing societal attitudes towards
certain industries and increasing demand for ‘corporate citizenship’ (social/ecological),
and the effects of an economic slump and recession for the organization’s supply
and pricing strategies (economic).The DESTEP analysis provides a framework for
summarizing and prioritizing all of these factors.Through such a guided analysis of
the environment, managers are able to describe the most important current environ-
mental changes and to predict future changes.