Full Stack Marketing Strategies for everyone impacted by your Brand
Marketing tends to focus on a single stakeholder – the customer. But creating value through product decisions, pricing decisions, distribution channel choices, even moral stands impacts a wide range of stakeholders including investors, partners, employees, the community, the environment – even future generations.
And just to make Stakeholder Marketing more complicated, an individual can belong to more than one stakeholder category at the same time.
Does your marketing strategy account for all your stakeholders? Do you know who your stakeholders are? Talk to us to get aligned.
Stakeholder Marketing Strategy Consulting
Effectively build and manage relationships with individuals, groups, or entities that affect or are affected by an organization’s Marketing activities, policies, or objectives. From customers and employees to communities and influencers.
Stakeholder Marketing Training
Creating a ‘stakeholder-conscious’ culture in your business requires changing hearts and minds. Our advanced Stakeholder Marketing strategy training courses incorporate stakeholder management as a key framework to change attitudes within the business.
Our Stakeholder Marketing Team
Pilote Media’s marketing consultancy practice is led by David Fuller, based in Dubai, but servicing the UAE, Saudi Arabia, the UK and Singapore.
David has over 30 years working in international markets in industries that have complicated stakeholder relationships including renewable energy and AI.
Stakeholder Marketing FAQs
Marketing focuses on one stakeholder – the customer. Stakeholder marketing creates strategies to develop products, adjust pricing, determine distribution channels and build messaging for multiple entities affected by those decisions. Stakeholder marketing tries to create value across all stakeholders by ensuring that the brand is not damaged by actions designed for one particular stakeholder group over another
In Marketing theory, the customer is the most important stakeholder, but there are others who are arguably equally important. Employees for example, or investors and shareholders. Other stakeholders might include future employees, partners, the industry, the media, government and regulatory bodies, the community – both local and the wider commonwealth. Some stakeholders may not be obvious or have a voice – like the environment or future generations.
Large software companies often host Summits that are open to all. Marketing budget is spent to influence buyers, end users, developers, resellers, the media and others. Sponsorship is also a Marketing activity that promotes a brand to wide group, not just buyers. For example, sponsorship of a local sports team shows a commitment to the community. Participating in a beach-cleanup or funding fresh water surveys would also come under Stakeholder Marketing.
No. CSR and ESG are subsets of marketing strategy. Companies that participate in CSR activity are doing to to signal certain messages about the brand. So the beneficiaries of CSR or ESG initiatives have been identified as stakeholders important enough to be influenced by the activity.
Perhaps. But it would require some non-standard business models and some strong leadership. Stakeholders often have competing priorities. Investors want to see a higher share price, customers want lower prices. Politicians may want renewable energy, but landowners don’t like the sight of windmills. Stakeholder marketing forces leaders to make decisions – some will be difficult decisions. Good CMOs already wrestle with these decisions – to prioritise short term revenue over customer lifetime value or accept brand damage where customers can’t switch. (This is not a strategy we would reccomend, but it happens more than you might think.)
Industries that have a large, diverse set of stakeholders should have a Stakeholder marketing strategy. Companies whose impact is larger than just the buyer-seller relationship. Traditionally, stakeholder management has sat in a PR silo in industries such as Energy, Infrastructure, Heavy Industry and more recently AI. AI is an interesting case study, because it impacts so many stakeholders in so many different ways, some good and some bad.