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Communications Strategy 107

power). Identifying the nature of these five forces for a particular market or market
segment allows organizations to understand its competitive position and ways of
consolidating and/or strengthening it.

3. Stakeholder analysis. While the above analyses of the organization’s environment,
position and capabilities provide the essential background context for the development
of any corporate, market or communications strategy, from a corporate communica-
tions perspective, it is in any case crucial to identify and understand the relationships
with the organization’s key stakeholders.This analysis should at least provide some
answers to the following questions: how will the organization’s actions impact on
stakeholders? What influence can stakeholders exert on the organization that may
affect the realization of its goals? What type of consequences may result from either’s
actions? What type of behaviours from stakeholders does the organization wish to
encourage? What reputation does the organization have with its stakeholders? Two
analytical tools can be used to provide answers to these questions: stakeholder map-
ping and reputation research.
Stakeholder mapping is an analytical tool whereby managers start with identify-
ing all stakeholder groups of an organization and display their relationship to the
organization and one another visually in a map.This mapping exercise should enable
the primary stakeholder relationships to be identified and the patterns of inter-
dependence to emerge.When all stakeholder groups are identified, the analysis con-
tinues with a classification of stakeholders in terms of the nature of the claim and
their priority to the organization. Freeman’s classification of equity stakes (i.e. those
who have some direct ‘ownership’ of the organization, such as stockholders, directors
or minority interest owners), economic or market stakes (i.e. those who have an
economic interest,but not an ownership interest,in the organization,such as employees,
customers, suppliers and competitors), and influencer stakes (i.e. those who do not
have either an ownership or economic interest in the actions of the organization, but
who have interests such as consumer advocates, environmental groups, trade organi-
zations and government agencies), which was mentioned in Chapter 3, is one way
of classifying stakeholder groups in an understandable and workable manner.Another
way of categorizing and analysing stakeholders is the approach advocated by Mitchell
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and his colleagues. They identify three key attributes of stakeholder groups whose
presence or absence can be used to identify, classify and prioritize stakeholder
relationships: power (the power of the stakeholder group upon an organization),
legitimacy (the legitimacy of the claim laid upon the organization by the stakeholder
group) and urgency (the degree to which stakeholder claims call for immediate
action). Combining these three attributes and their presence or absence leads to
seven different types of stakeholders as shown in Box 4.2 and provides managers with
a prioritized list of stakeholder groups as an input for strategy.
A second form of stakeholder analysis is to identify the different reputations that
organizations have with various stakeholder groups. Chapter 3 distinguished between
qualitative methods such as in-depth interviews and focus group sessions, and quan-
titative methods of reputation research;the latter including a larger sample of respon-
dents who are then asked to rate the organization on a number of pre-defined
dimensions.Both qualitative and quantitative methods can be used but should be atten-
tive to the diversity of stakeholder groups of the organization (as identified by the