The Business of Influence: Reframing Marketing and PR for the Digital Age

Influence Strategy

I referred earlier to one of my favourite observations from the Balanced Scorecard book in which the authors state that they had never come across a management team that had reached full consensus on the relative importance of its strategic objectives; and they attribute this to executives’ obsession with their own specialism and corresponding ‘blind spots’ when it comes to the other disciplines. In my experience, this applies equally among the leaders of the marketing and PR teams. We’ve just seen how setting influence objectives rather than marketing objectives and PR objectives opens out the scope of the work; it distances it from each participant’s comfort zone or rut. This advantage continues with the development of influence strategy.

The influence strategy is at once part of the overall organizational strategy (for what is an organizational strategy devoid of any aspect of influence?) and driven by it (see Figure 7.1).

Figure 7.1: Objectives and strategy

An organization’s strategy describes how it expects to create future, sustainable value for all its stakeholders. Its influence strategy describes how it expects to influence and be influenced in ways that are wholly necessary and sufficient for the achievement of the influence objectives and successful execution of the overarching strategy.

The influence strategy is the set of influence activities in ...