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

Mapping the Influence Strategy

You have identified your influence objectives and the set of influence activities in which you must excel in order to help to create a sustainable difference in the marketplace – the influence strategy. It’s now time to map it to visualize and communicate the causes and effects, to check its completeness, and to identify the required investment in intangible assets – i.e. human, information and organization capital.

It’s worth restating briefly why dealing with these intangible assets in a professional manner is difficult, to the point of impossibility, without this kind of approach. The value derived from intangible assets is indirect, resulting only through chains of cause and effect; an intangible asset only has value in context, depending on its strategic alignment; intangible assets have to work together in harmony (referred to as bundles by Kaplan and Norton), rarely being valuable alone; and the cost of an intangible asset seldom has any relation to its value. Is it any wonder that investment in intangible assets causes such confusion and emotional debate?

Earlier, in Table 6.3, we listed example management processes found in Strategy Maps for the four internal perspectives: operations management processes, customer management processes, innovation processes, and regulatory and social processes. (Note that this ‘social’ is not the same ‘social’ as in ‘social media’.) Now we can reproduce this table, keeping only those management processes that ...