I was lucky. The first time I was exposed to an actual SWOT (Strengths-Weaknesses-Opportunities-Threats) analysis in action was for and with a Fortune 100 client as a full-fledged member of the integrated marketing communications (IMC) team.
We worked together over a long and arduous four-day weekend with each discipline - advertising, promotion, direct response and public relations - joined together with the client's marketing managers, researchers and corporate communications executives. It was an exhausting and exhilarating experience that I'll never forget and from which I was able to take away the hard-won planning skills that help clients assess their situations and effectively marshal their marketing communications resources.
The SWOT analysis is the single most important platform from which to begin building a sophisticated and success-driven plan.
At its most effective, the SWOT analysis and prioritization is a backdrop for the zero-based, or method-neutral planning process. This process allows marketers to look at all marketing communications tools as equals, not favoring one over the other. In this way, the planning process is started with a "clean slate" and marketers are able to choose those disciplines and activities that will ultimately contribute the most to the successful achievement of the desired goals. By approaching marketing communications planning from this non-biased vantage point, planners are able to truly focus on the strategic directions revealed from a thorough SWOT analysis.
SWOT, as it has become known in the marketing industry, is shorthand for the careful study and overall evaluation of a company's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Once performed, it enables the company - or product, service or brand - to develop very specific measurable goals for the planning period.
Following the SWOT analysis, the next phase of the strategic planning process is to map out and implement specific strategies and tactics that will most productively "respond" to the findings of the SWOT analysis and therefore most effectively contribute to success.
Let's focus now on the how-tos and benefits of the SWOT analysis itself.
The first step in conducting a SWOT analysis is to take an in-depth look at the internal strengths and weaknesses of your client's product, service, brand or company - whichever fits the assignment-at-hand. This must be an exhaustive (but not necessarily time-consuming) study of what is working well and what's not. In this phase, you look at everything including internal operations and resources, product attributes and consumer benefits, sales performance, customer satisfaction ratings, distribution channels, pricing, retail performance or problems, brand and corporate image.
It's important in this assessment to draw from as many sources of information and data as possible including your client's research, the studies done by outside sources and even your own primary and secondary research.
With that as a solid base, you're ready to add the next layer of investigation: taking a complete look at the external factors that impact your client in the form of opportunities and threats.
The picture revealed from this process - investigating the competitive field, all influencer relationships from retail to Wall Street to advocacy groups to the media, marketplace trends, cultural and environmental forces and so on - can be rich with new understandings about current challenges and those that lie ahead.
As all of these pieces come together, you are now ready to take an important step back to sort out what you've learned, to draw conclusions and to uncover those nuggets of insights that reveal exactly where your brand stands now and what's standing in the way of its success - with no sugar-coating and no built-in biases. What you have now is the boiled-down essential truth for that brand, product, service or organization for the anticipated near-term future. And it's at this point that the SWOT analysis is taken another giant step forward by applying a gap analysis that compares the perceptions of customers, management and key influencers to the ideal.
What is learned through a SWOT analysis is prioritized based on a thoughtful assessment of the realistic damages if weaknesses or threats are not addressed, the realistic benefits if strengths and opportunities are leveraged, the cost of addressing or leveraging each and the realistic assessment of the window of opportunity presented by the marketplace landscape.
This communication planning process, depicted as simple, progressive steps in the "Zero-Based Communication Planning Chart," can then be applied - smartly and with reasonable confidence.
The SWOT analysis determines what needs to be accomplished. The marketing communications mix is determined by which discipline will be the most beneficial. PR, especially marketing-based PR, has an enormous advantage here as a part of the overall marketing communications matrix. It has the capacity to deliver highly customized messages to key audiences and to do so very cost-effectively.
Lastly, the SWOT analysis and prioritization not only leads us to the smartest, most high-yield marketing communications drivers to achieve success, it also clearly points us toward our overall integrated message strategies. It painlessly leads us to which messages will be most necessary and credible, delivered by which discipline, when, and to which critical audience.
Barbara H. Hines is executive VP of brand marketing at Porter Novelli. She can be reached at 617/587-2008.