Stakeholders, public and audiences

Your business depends on your stakeholders
In this class we agreed that a stakeholder is anyone with some form of interest in an organisation, anyone affecting it or affected by it. And according to my own researches, I would also say that on them depends business’ legitimacy and sustainability, where sustainability means not compromising future generations’ needs: in the social, environmental, economic areas.

And it appears that PR has the responsibility to manage all this: the reputation and perception of the business or organisation, and the establishment of good relationships with stakeholders. We’ve also learnt that nowadays organisations have a more active vision about this mission: stakeholders have replaced target audiences, probably because there is more and more interactivity in businesses, and that people are more educated so less passive. I’ve also learnt, from my insights about crisis management (see my first post!), that at a corporate level PR is now more proactive than reactive: the relationships with stakeholders are more planned and thought through. This can even lead to an instrumental stakeholder perspective, which is basically how to proceed to make money.

So in order to manage an organisation’s reputation with all stakeholders, I’ve understood from further reading that we have to define first the organisation’s identity, inside the business, and then its image, outside the business: of course there is usually more than one image for one organisation, and when it’s not consistent enough it affects the organisation’s reputation. That is why an organisation needs to engage with a wide variety of stakeholders in order to minimize issues that may develop into problems. This is when PR comes: PR job is to make match the identity (inner reality) and the image (perceptions of it). That means that all communication activities should be “passed through” a “PR filter”, in order to provide a consistent message for all stakeholders, through adapted communication tools. That is why we today talk about integrated communications, which needs this “PR filter”, and where the hub would be the brand: see this approach above with Coca-cola.

Who are my stakeholders?
But before properly engaging with your stakeholders, you have of course to define them: who are they, where are they? This requires an environmental scanning, and this can be done through Integrated Marketing Communications.
Indeed, one of the major issues facing today’s reputation managers is the increasing reliance of consumers and prospects on perceptions rather than facts when they make buying decisions; we now live in an age of “sound bite” decision making. According to Schultz, Tannenbaum and Lauterborn in Integrated Marketing Communications, “This increasing reliance on perceptions or the gathering of small bits of information about products and services, will be a growing challenge to marketers. (…) This new “sound bite” approach to gathering marketing information demands that a marketer’s statement must be clear, consistent and comprehensible. In this fast-paced, information-overload marketplace, integrated marketing communications (IMC) will be vital.” So we can agree that communications is a vital ingredient of marketing and the tools required are collectively referred to as the communications mix. A lot of companies have traditionally separated the various elements of the communications mix, in some cases to such an extent that advertising, PR, direct marketing and sales promotion were totally separate departments. But as channels for delivering corporate messages continue to grow and techniques for relationship marketing become more and more advanced, integrating the different elements of the communications mix produces results that are more efficient, measurable, and above all, consistent.
That is the main IMC’s aim: consistent messages; and this requires putting the customer at the centre of the business (this idea started to be developed in the 90’s). So basically, IMC represent all forms of brand messages (employee com, corporate culture etc), in order to look the same way as customers. And as a consistent message builds trust and prevents from ambiguity, IMC makes both economic and communication sense.

This is particularly vital when launching a campaign: in class we came across 3 tools that help defining an organisation’s stakeholders, especially useful in a communication campaign context. The first tool was going through 9 segments of the population, 9 ways of defining them: demographic, psychographic, geographic, organisational membership, and 5 different ways of how influential people can be: covert power (like lobbies and NGO), role in decision making, influencers (role models), opinion formers (journalists, doctors etc) and decision makers.
The second tool helped to define stakeholders according to what public think about your organisation; this is Grunning’s theory: there is the non public, the latent public, the aware public and the active public. The ones to target are the 2 in the middle, as there is no really point to target those whose minds are already made, or those who won’t care about what you are going to tell.
The third tool was defining stakeholders according to their influence and interest: see map. With this tool the most important ones are those in the top right: people with a high influence and a high interest in your organisation.
I think that for a campaign the most useful tool would be the first one, as it helps to make a very wide environmental scanning. I think the second one is useful for a consumer targeted communication, whereas the third one would be more adapted to communicate on people more directly involved in the business.

Britvic: a stakeholder management case study
In October-December 2005, the soft drink company Britvic launched the Project Helium: in Autumn 2005, Britvic’s four shareholders decided to list the company on the LSE by the end of the year. They planned to be admitted to the LSE in mid-December, and therefore launched a communication campaign in October. The communication team was divided into 4 groups, under the Corporate Affairs’ one: Media Communications, Employee Communications, Public Affairs and Events, in order to engage with all stakeholders needed, and to keep the messages consistent. The main objectives were to drive favourable coverage about the company, in the consumer press but also in the city news section, to also engage at company director level audiences, and to court and provide information to analysts and third party commentators. The main messages were “Britvic is a good company to invest in”, “Britvic is a leading soft drinks company”, “Britvic is innovative” etc. The team was operating in a press office throughout the process, with a constant media monitoring and co-ordination with external agencies. The results were very positive: 362 press articles in total, of which 98% favourable and 40% strongly so. The total audience reached almost 181 million, and coverage volume peaks were seen on each of the four “spike days”.
I guess this success was due to a good management of well-defined key stakeholders, while monitoring the communication process throughout the campaign. Also, the co-ordination between different communication departments may have helped them having an integrated campaign with consistent messages towards these stakeholders.
So in the light of this example and of what I’ve said above, my personal conclusion about stakeholder management would be 3 key words: planning, accuracy and organisation!

Sources:
-Michaela O’Brien and Pam William’s 13th February 2008 presentation, University of Westminster
-John Dalton’s 16th October 2006 presentation, London School of Public Relations
- Schultz, Tannenbaum and Lauterborn Integrated Marketing Communications, NTC Contemporary publishing Group, 1998