Fulfilment of

Stakeholder
Expectations

Dr. Paula Stephens

© University of South Wales

 Learning Objectives
• To understand the importance of the needs and expectations
of stakeholder groups
• To understand the importance of ranking stakeholders in
terms of their level of importance to the business
• To comprehend the relationship between stakeholders and
marketing planning.

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 A general definition
• Stakeholders can be defined as all entities that are
impacted through a business running its
operations and conducting other activities related
to its existence
• The impact can be direct in the case of customers
and suppliers
• Or indirect for the communities in which the
business is located.

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 How do the needs and expectations of
stakeholders influence strategic marketing
• Businesses must consider the needs and
expectations of stakeholders
– but are they all of equal importance?
• Which ones are more important?
• How do you rank them?
• Stakeholder analysis…

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 Marketing Myopia
Levitt, T. (1960), Marketing Myopia, Harvard
Business Review
…businesses will do better in the end if they
concentrate on meeting customers’ needs rather
than on selling products.

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 The New Marketing Myopia
Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, N. Craig
Smith, Minette E. Drumwright and Mary C.
Gentile, Volume 29 (1), Spring 2010.

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Three related phenomena of the New
Marketing Myopia
1. A single minded focus on the customer to the
exclusion of other stakeholders
2. An overly narrow definition of the customer
and his / her needs
3. Failure to recognise the changed societal
context of business that necessitates
addressing multiple stakeholders.
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 Key propositions of the new
marketing myopia
1. Map the company’s stakeholders
2. Determine stakeholder salience – who counts
3. Research stakeholder issues and expectations
and measure impact
4. Engage with stakeholders
5. Embed a stakeholder orientation.

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 John Lewis Christmas Advert 2015
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuz2ILq4UeA

• A single minded focus on the customer to the

exclusion of other stakeholders
• An overly narrow definition of the customer and
his / her needs
• Failure to recognise the changed societal context
of business that necessitates addressing multiple
stakeholders.

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Scenario Building
and Forecasting

Nihar Amoncar

© University of South Wales

 Learning Objectives
• To be able to understand the importance of future planning
and strategic choices
• To be aware of the stages of scenario building

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 Some thoughts

• The future is unpredictable

• Experience indicates that a single forecast
cannot be relied upon
• Successful planning involves developing
scenarios from which can evolve a suitably
flexible strategy

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 Uncertainty in strategy…
• The quality of a strategy is difficult to
evaluate:-
– Management may disguise a low quality strategy
– High quality strategies may not not be convincing
in the marketplace (Zenger, 2013)
• Strategic decisions are made difficult because
of incompleteness of information.

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 How to deal with this uncertainty…
• Anticipatory action based on the awareness of
possible futures
• Evaluation of the effect of change across
multiple variables
• Consideration of different strategic actions
(Johnston et al. 2008)
…. i.e. scenario analysis

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 Scenario Analysis…
• A conceptual framework: -
– that allows organisations to understand the external
environment as it unfolds
– Accept the uncertainty as given
– Use it to provide a description of two or more future
scenarios

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Pause for thought(s)…

Discuss experiences of scenario building;

operationalisation; viability of such an
approach…

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 Purpose of Scenario Building
● To support understanding of what possible
futures might look like; how they might come
about; why this might happen.
● Develop new ideas that will lead to fresh, new
decisions
● Provide a new context to reframe existing
decisions
● Identify contingent strategies

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 How to do it… the stages.
Stage 1: Task identification and analysis (what is the focal
issue?)
Stage 2: Appraisal of the key factors (what factors are
influencing the success or failure of stage 1, eg market
size, long range economic conditions)
Stage 3: Driving forces of change (from the environment
that influence the key factors)
Stage 4: Ranking of the key decision factors, based on the
importance of the focal issue and the degree of
uncertainty

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 How to do it… the final
stage
• Stage 5: Identifying alternative scenarios. This
is the heart of the scenario building process
where intuition, insight and creativity play an
important role.

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 Writing the scenario…
• Three scenario approaches remain popular: -
– Best guess
– Base case
– Middle ground
• Drilling down to two scenarios overcomes the problem
of focusing on the middle ground
• Good practice is to identify the most likely scenario
• A single marketing strategy must emerge to cope with
the identified scenarios

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 The Value of Scenario Analysis
and Planning
• The discovery of unique solutions to complex,
ongoing problems
• To develop individual’s decision-making skills
• To reinforce the organisation’s resilience value
system
• To ensure key decision makers are aware of
changes in the environment and likely impacts
(Trim and Lee, 2008)
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Pause for thought….

Shell was among the first to practice scenario

planning in the late 1960s and one of the few
companies ready when the oil crisis hit in 1973.

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 Types of Scenario Analysis
Strategy–developing scenarios: -
– Can help create contingency plans to protect against
unexpected events or disasters
– Can suggest investment strategies to capitalise on
future opportunities

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Types of Scenario Analysis, cont:
• Decision-driven scenarios: -
– Key objective is to challenge strategies to
make them more robust in withstanding
competitive forces

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 References
• Johnstone, M., Gilmore, A. and Carson, D. (2008) “Dealing
with environmental uncertainty: The value of scenario
planning for small to medium sized enterprises,”
European Journal of Marketing, 42, (11), pp.1170-8
• Trim, P.R.J. and Yang-Im, L. (2008), “A strategic marketing
intelligence and multi-organisational resilience
framework,” European Journal of Marketing, 42, (7/8),
pp.731-45
• Zenger, T. (2013), :Strategy: The Uniqueness Challenge,”
Harvard Business Review, 91, (November), pp.52-8

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