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Gaining competitive intelligence is one of the primary reasons for implementing a brand media analysis program. Understanding how the media positions your organization before your stakeholders, as compared to that of the competition, arms you with intelligence to recognize trends and take advantage competitive strengths and weaknesses. In this post, part one of a two part series, we will borrow some exercises from a SWOT analysis to assist in the evaluation of an organization’s media presence in order to identify what differentiates them from the competition.

So what is SWOT? It’s a strategic process that identifies the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats of an organization’s competitive positioning. Using this technique, we are going to look at how PR measurement can provide competitive intelligence and how we can use this information to evaluate and enhance PR strategies.

The four components of a SWOT analysis are broken down into two segments:

The internal factors:

• Strengths: what an organization possesses or does well in regards to the competition as it relates to achieving the stated objective
• Weaknesses: what an organization does not possess or do well in regards to the competition as it relates to achieving the stated objective

And the external factors:

• Opportunities: conditions that exist and present a venue to advance the stated objective
• Threats: conditions that exist and present a barrier to achieving the stated objective

With that in mind, let’s start by looking at those items that differentiate an organization from the competition, its strengths and weaknesses, and what we can identify based upon a brand’s media presence. To accomplish this, we’ll delve into a couple areas of evaluation, a brand’s media visibility and positioning, and what can be derived in order to fill in the “S” and “W” quadrants. It is important to keep in mind that this must be in relation to the competition for a specific market or it is meaningless.

Visibility: If we take an in-depth look at brand visibility and understand how your share of voice varies between individual key performance indicators as compared to the whole (see Sample Chart 1), then we are able to better highlight areas of strengths and weaknesses. Criteria for evaluation may include your share of voice in:

• Desirable exposure (positive and neutral sentiment) – Is your media exposure aiding an advantage in awareness?
• Negative exposure– Is your brand more susceptible to threats?
• Spokesperson visibility – Are your spokespeople taking the lead in demonstrating expertise and thought leadership?
• Regional exposure – Does your organization garner a larger share of voice in specific regions?
• Target audiences/stakeholders – Do you fare better or worse among the business community? Activists? General Consumers? Industry Analysts?
• Different mediums – You may achieve a greater share of voice in newspapers, but what about broadcast mediums? Twitter? Blogs?

Sample Chart 1

Positioning: Just as it is important to understand the extent to which you are visible to your target audiences/stakeholders, it is equally important to understand how that visibility distinguishes you from the competition. To expand upon your strengths and weakness, we need to capture the specific attributes that are being tied to your brand, and to that of the competition, in the media. We went into the details of positioning statements in our previous post: Three Metrics That Make PR Measurement More Meaningful.

When analyzing this data, it is essential to go attribute by attribute in order to understand what differentiates you from the competition. I believe that you will find that this is where a great deal of the insight lies. Innovation, environmental sustainability, product quality, and customer experience offer a few examples of attributes that can be evaluated. These will vary based on the industry and not all attributes are created equal. It’s important to understand those attributes which your stakeholders place the greatest value on in order to better understand their potential impact on brand reputation. This data can be gathered by asking your stakeholders to rate the importance of each brand, product or service attribute, which can be easily incorporated into your awareness and perception surveys and/or through ongoing customer satisfaction surveys.

In the second of this two part series, we will cover the opportunities and threats section of a SWOT analysis and the potential action items that can be uncovered from this exercise.