Power Mapping

I recently started a book called “Regulatory Hacking” by Evan Burfield, and in it he talks about this concept called Power Mapping. It’s something I’d never heard someone talk about, and so I quickly started to scour the internet to learn more about it. As it turns out, the term has its roots in both social justice and in political stakeholder theory — which I thought was super cool! Simply put, a power map is a visual representation of individual stakeholders and their relative power to influence decisions.

In the book, Evan uses the concept to adeptly talk about how companies in regulated industries need to build out a power map to better understand their go-to-market strategies and the threats to the business. The power map also lets you better understand how a given business might threaten other businesses.

Now that you understand the concept of Power Mapping, let’s look at how a power map might look. Below you can find a sketch of a power map used in a public policy frame.

#WhiteBoards4TheWin.

On the x-axis you map out an individual stake-holder propensity to agree with you position or perspective. On the y-axis you map out how important and powerful each stake-holder is when it comes to having influence on the outcome you’re vying for.

Practically this means that is highly supportive of you and a big decision maker goes on the top left. Someone that his highly supportive but has no power or influence goes on the bottom left.

In contract, someone who is adamantly opposed and a big decision maker goes on the top right. Someone who is adamantly opposed and has no power goes on the bottom right. All other positions go in-between.

By building this map for each policy item, individuals can understand who their allies are and who the opposition is. They can also better understand who is likely to be influenced in one direction or the other. This provides a framework whereby individuals can understand the political map their working with.

Now let’s look at how a company might build a power map.

Power Mapping for Uber

In his book, Evan talks a lot about Uber. He uses Uber as a good example of how a power map might have been used by the company to understand how officials within cities might respond to their service (i.e. ride sharing). Some of the groups that get mapped include the Taxi & Limo Commission, Mayors office, Council Members, etc.

By understanding how each player thinks about “ride sharing” Uber could then build strategies to help convince stakeholders that sit in the middle of the power map to become allies and not waste precious time and resources going after stakeholders that lived on either extreme end of the x-axis — unless of course supportive decision makers could be leveraged to build support with other groups or individuals on the power map.

What’s great about Power Mapping is that it doesn’t just work for companies in regulated industries. If you’re not a GovTech, CivicTech, Digital Health, or FinTech company, you can still use the framework!

Power Mapping for Non-Regulated Markets

Another way of thinking about the map is instead of building it around a regulated service like “ride sharing” try instead to insert your the service your business provides. For example if you’re “Cars.com” you’d be building a map around “selling cars online.” Then you’d start listing stakeholders like auto companies, car buyers, auction houses, dealerships, newspapers that advertise cars, car insurance, Carfax, credit score companies, banks that provide lending, etc. You’d start to place each stake-holder on the map by asking, “how does selling cars online impact this stakeholder?” And as the map got built out you’d begin to build strategies on how to influence stakeholders or position the company to provide value to each stakeholder.

Lastly, the idea of Power Mapping can also be used to understand the buying journeys of customers.

Power Mapping to Understand Customer Buying

If you’re using the concept of Power Mapping to understand the customer buying journey you need to start by asking the following question: “Who gets impacted when my internal champion tries to buy my service or product?”

In an ideal world, the user of your product or service would sit as a die-hard decision maker (Top left position), but as we all know that isn’t usually what happens. More likely, your user is die hard or actively in support of your product/service but only has the power to influence the decision, their boss is the decision maker. This is especially true for higher ACV products.

That means that you need to map out the boss, the user, and others impacted by the product/service on your diagram. This includes people who might not be supportive of the purchase or who might be tasked with reigning in spending. By going through this exercise you’ll better understand how a decision is going to get made within your customers organization.

Once you’ve fully built the power map for your customer you can use it to help drive your marketing content pieces. You should create a piece of content that engages each stakeholder and addresses their concerns and provides reasoning for why the purchase of the given product or service is a no-brain decision. And once this content has been created, you can run an account based marketing campaign to help change the hearts and minds of each stakeholder!

If you end up creating a power map, I’d love to see how it came out! Please tweet it to me @frederikg191 or send it to me on Instagram (same handle). Hope you also find the concept helpful and interesting!