You probably deal with many granular questions every week as you decide on what to share.
What is the content that our audience consumes? What current affairs define online conversations? What do competitors post? What channels or creative are popular?
These questions are excellent and will help you excel in your career.
It’s healthy to consider success an uncertainty, even if it isn’t fun.
It’s optional to look very far. Seven of the ten largest companies on the S&P 500 in 1980 were oil and gas firms. Microsoft and Proctor and Gamble overtook IBM, which enjoyed a profitable decade in the 1980s. Microsoft became one of the most valuable companies in less than ten years.
Guess how many of 1980’s top 10 valued companies are still among the top 10 in 2020.
Seeing how much the world has changed in only twenty years is incredible. Oil and gas stocks, once accounted for more than 25% of the market, now make up less than 5%. Kodak was one of the most popular companies in the 1980s. Today, it is almost unrecognizable. The course of giants today could be changed by mergers, recessions, or bankruptcies. Companies we believe will succeed in twenty years may not exist yet. Apple’s future was impossible to predict in 1985.
What can you, as a marketer, do to prepare yourself for the future?
Three Frameworks for a Brand’s big picture
You can begin to think about the trends and topics that will define your business’s future by learning how to use simple strategic frameworks. This will give you an advantage in identifying areas and conversations you should research. These frameworks will help you to reinforce your company’s purpose and analyze the other players in the market to improve your position.
Five Forces Framework
The Five Forces Framework, created by academic Michael Porter and essentially Lebron James for modern strategy, is a popular way to analyze what is happening outside your business.
Porter’s Five Forces is a five-part model that helps answer the question, “How attractive is it to work in a particular industry?”
Porter’s Five Forces help you understand how power is distributed within an industry. It also shows how easy it is for a company to enter the market and how likely they are to survive.
Take the airline industry as an example. Airbus and Boeing are the only significant suppliers. It can cause shockwaves to the entire industry if they decide to increase prices or strike. Getting into the airline industry is also more work because building planes or market websites costs so much.
The real estate market is more competitive, and buyers have many options to compare prices (brokers, sites). In sectors such as food and beverages, many competitors offer healthier alternatives at low prices to those who want to switch.
Trends affecting buyers affect every company, even if they don’t have a traditional framework for suppliers or buyers (i.e., modern internet companies).
You can start by zooming out to see the space or industry in which your brand operates. This information can be found with a quick Google Search or Yahoo Finance. Use the above image to guide your template. The rivalry is in the middle, and the forces around it are outlined.
Ask yourself: What other tools are they using? What would your users be doing if you disappeared tomorrow? Think about the entire industry. Is it simple for new companies? Is loyalty important? You can learn a lot from the image above. The output will determine what you do next. It’s important to know what your competitors do if customer loyalty is low or switching costs are high.
How to use the framework:
PESTELE is a more comprehensive approach to understanding the trends that impact your brand. It requires more research than the Five Forces model, which relies on intuition and an understanding of business models.
Each of the drivers in your PESTLE analysis should be examined separately. Has there been any legislation that may impact your business? Are there any new laws on the horizon? What recent social trends could make your business more appealing? Any new technology (i.e., What new technology (i.e., generative AI) could change how people use your service dramatically?
PESTELE encourages you to be creative in your approach to business.
SWOT Analysis
A SWOT analysis is a popular tool to help you categorize your company’s performance. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities Threats. It focuses on how the present and future coexist in a single framework. Look at the SWOT example of Nike. While you can see how a strong business is operating in the present, SWOT’s section on opportunities and threats can help Nike determine its future direction. Does it move into better PR, or does it stay the same?
SWOT is no different. It only works if you are creative and consider incorporating existing trends.
How to use the framework:
The SWOT analysis can be an excellent tool for evaluating your brand. It is easy to do and focuses mainly on internal factors.
You likely already have the necessary knowledge to perform a SWOT analysis with little research. SWOT can be performed at the functional level. For example, your social media can benefit from SWOT. This includes thinking about strengths (which platforms you are most robust on), weaknesses (content that is struggling), opportunities (new venue and competitive advantages), as well as threats.
Don’t underestimate your role in zooming out
Although not all jobs require building and populating models, you can still use this skill to succeed in any position.
It can benefit a company that is already established or a large company. You always listen and watch if you work in customer service or social media.
You need help fixing everything. Even the most brilliant executives couldn’t predict that iPhone adoption would skyrocket. Even if you aren’t making the decision for the company, one input into a SWOT or PESTLE can help the business survive the next 20 years.
