Stakeholder Marketing? Part 1 — A new approach in tune with the world’s complexity
A new approach in tune with the world’s complexity
Today’s marketing has been built to reach one group of people: customers. As the main stakeholder who buys a business’ goods or services, they have long been the subject of marketing research-what they need, how they think, how to reach them.
In reality, businesses are supported by a complex web of communities and stakeholder groups, including ones that fall outside their assumed “target audience,” (we can talk in a different post about the use of the term target audience but for now, let’s stay focused). Different stakeholder groups have different relationships to a brand and to each other, and should not be considered in a vacuum. To the extent that a business markets to its customers without considering their context, it loses its ability to connect with that audience authentically.
Welcome to the brave new world of stakeholder marketing. It can be a corrective method to customer-focused marketing, a new approach designed for an environment in which brands no longer centrally control the message and transactions aren’t a simple two-party exchange.
Translation: a customer’s relationship with a business is influenced and mediated by other stakeholders groups. A brand’s relationship with the world is part of a system -multiple systems, in fact. An ecosystem.
So say goodbye to imagined “customer personas,” each with fixed attributes, and consider stakeholder marketing instead. This approach is for understanding and engaging with all the communities that support a business, including ones that fall outside the assumed “target audience.”
Why is this so important? Doing the work of uncovering various stakeholder groups, listening to what they express, assessing their respective needs and understanding their relationship to the brand (and each other) allows a company to recognize their values while also minimizing collective harm. And that, in turn, strengthens relationships with communities and sustains relationships and ultimately success.
Stakeholder Marketing: A Definition
Said plainly….
Stakeholder marketing means a brand’s relationship isn’t only with someone who purchases from them or they want to purchase from them, it’s with everyone and everything the business comes into contact with.
However, in practice, Stakeholder marketing is about engaging communities and recognizing the needs, values and interests within, with the purpose of producing and maintaining mutually beneficial relationships across the ecosystem while also minimizing harm.
Make no mistake, engaging stakeholder marketing requires a level of thought and then action that may be intimidating to those who haven’t already done the work of mapping stakeholders, codifying community values, and establishing a valued role within their communities.
According to the most comprehensive study of stakeholder marketing to date — “Stakeholder marketing: theoretical foundations and required capabilities,” published in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science in 2015-there are three important transitions that have occurred involving the interrelatedness of stakeholders.
These are:
- The transition from centralized to dispersed control of brand messaging
- The transition from implicit to explicit stakeholder tensions: conflicting interests can no longer be ignored, as stakeholders can now more easily organize and make themselves heard
- The transition from two-person exchanges to complex exchanges
All three of these encompass one central idea: marketing relationships do not occur between a brand and a homogeneous “persona” group or an imaged one to one relationship. Instead, they occur within emergent systems of conversation. I know what you’re thinking, Rai-mon, I see the link but seriously, what the hell is an emergent system of conversation? And I’m glad you asked because the answer is actually really important.
Emergent systems are what happens in a system that cannot happen with all the individual’s people parts of that system by themselves. It’s what greater means in the statement, greater than the sum of their parts.
Old hierarchical institutions of information and power are currently being replaced with more horizontal or flatforms of knowledge production and communication. Imagine a flock of birds changing direction en masse-or millions of people interacting on social network platforms.
“Stakeholder marketing recognizes that customer relationships may be influenced by relationships with other stakeholders and that a diverse network of stakeholders creates value,” Bas Hillebrand, Paul H. Driessen and Oliver Koll wrote in their Journal article.
Originally published at https://consciouslyinc.com on October 23, 2020.