I attended a short seminar presented by our friend Heather Mangold from Mangold Creative that covered building a small business marketing strategy for 2013. While we often work off of clients’ marketing strategies, and have at times worked with our clients to help them develop online marketing strategies for themselves, it’s always great to get a different perspective and ideas on how a company perceives strengths, weaknesses, target audiences, and tactics. It’s even more interesting to get immediate feedback from someone who works in it day in and day out, such as how Heather does.
For marketers, S.W.O.T. analyses are a cornerstone for building any marketing plan, strategy, etc. Heck, S.W.O.T. analyses can be used to improve the efficiences of more than just a business or organization, they can also help improve business departments, teams, and individuals.
During this seminar, however, Heather brought a spin to the typical SWOT analysis exercise, which I liked a lot. Instead of focusing on your S.W.O.T. (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats), it may be more optimal to focus on your S.P.O.T. A S.P.O.T. analysis follows the same routine as a S.W.O.T. analysis, only with one primary difference (can you guess?). Instead of identifying and focusing on your “weaknesses”, such as in a SWOT analysis, you should instead identify and focus on your “passions” (another version of the SPOT analysis uses “Problems” for the “P”, but that’s basically the same as “weaknesses” in our opinion).
S.W.O.T. Analysis
Ultimately, using “passion” as compared to “weaknesses” focuses on the positive more than the negatives. For those that may not be acclimated to a S.W.O.T. analysis, the image to the left will help you gain a better visual idea of how one is organized. Basically, you have your four sections (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats), which are organized into a grid of four sections.
The two rows show internal and external abilities of the organization and its environment, and the two columns organize the four areas into sections that are helpful and harmful to the objectives of the organization (S.W.O.T. analyses can be used in business plans, marketing plans, individual / departmental reviews, etc., so the columns and rows will vary in applicability based on the subject of the analysis).
As mentioned previously, with a SWOT analysis, you review the weaknesses of the subject; which can be a poor approach for two reasons.
- It focuses on the negative, which does not necessarily help achieve the objectives in the end. It can help by raising awareness of weaknesses, but in most scenarios, it does not present information that can be utilized as appropriately as the “passions” of the subject.
- Secondly, more time is often spent trying to correct weaknesses of an organization, which is wasteful and often times very hard to do. So instead of trying to invest a lot of time or money into improving the weaknesses, we find it best to focus on refining the passions of the subject, which is much easier.
So, passions are a better focus than weaknesses because they focus on the positive, which can help fuel progress. They also present us with options that we can more easily use to gain “wins” from our marketing in the end. This all sounds good… But what does this look like and how do we put it all together?
S.P.O.T. Analysis
Well, to start, the organization of a S.P.O.T. analysis is different than that of the more traditional SWOT analysis. This is because instead of having two harmful sections (weaknesses and threats), we now only have one (threats). And instead of having two helpful sections (strengths and opportunities), we now have three (strengths, passions, and opportunities).
As you can see from our image to the left, we have chosen to format our S.P.O.T. analysis visual as a Venn Diagram. I like to look at a S.P.O.T. analysis in this way as provides us with a number of visual insights into how each section interacts with the other.
Firstly, you’ll notice that each section overlaps an opposite section individually. I think this is a very important note as it’s true that each individual section is a direct / indirect influencer over each other individual section.
For example, strengths can at times borderline as, or become threats to an organization. A good example of when this can happen is when an organization tries to enter a new market they have never been in before. Let’s say your sales force is very effective with the current market using guerrilla-style sales tactics. If you’re looking to approach a more apprehensive market to broaden your product / service reach, then this once-perceived strength can become a threat to your organization.
So, in the example of a S.P.O.T. analysis, you can see that a threat is no longer just an external influencer, but it can also be an internal one as well. The same view can be used with each section, comparing one-to-one; however, you’ll notice that the overlap happens in instances more than just one-to-one. Overlap can actually happen in a two-to-one and three-to-one scenario as well.
It’s very important that each section be identified so as to gain the best understanding possible for the organization. The middle section (where all four intersect) is your “big win” section. If you have fully identified your strengths, passions, opportunities, and threats; and you have come an understanding with how each can affect your business, both positively and negatively, then you are on the right path with understanding and setting objectives for your organization / business, etc.
A Regal S.P.O.T. Analysis
To give you an example of how a S.P.O.T. analysis can be filled out, I have completed one for our firm, based on my personal opinion and insights. Additionally, I have put together a print-out you can download and use for yourself (or your organization) if you like the idea of using passions instead of weaknesses.
As you can see from my S.P.O.T. analysis for Regal, there are a great deal of strengths, passions, and opportunities that we have that overlap. Additionally, our threats, in my opinion, are rather minimal and really just represent our time in the market and how we approach growing our business; however, as mentioned, they should not be ignored.
Have you done a S.W.O.T. or S.P.O.T. analysis for your business? How has that worked out for you? We’d love to hear about your experiences, troubles or success in the comments below! If you have any questions, please feel free to ask them in the comments too.
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