Why communicators keep underestimating influential stakeholders

Traditional stakeholder mapping remains invaluable, but communicators who equate power with influence risk overlooking the people best positioned to shape organisational outcomes.

By Martin Deakin

Back in 2021, Engine No. 1, a small San Francisco-based activist hedge fund, made headlines when it secured three seats on ExxonMobil’s board. It owned around 0.02% of the company’s total shares and, on paper, was hardly the most powerful stakeholder at the table. Yet by building a coalition of institutional investors around shared concerns about ExxonMobil's long-term strategy, it won a hard-fought proxy battle and forced the company to rethink its direction.

Looking back, Engine No. 1’s success raises an important question. Are we, as communications professionals, better at identifying stakeholders with formal power than those with genuine influence?

Stakeholder mapping still matters

Many PR, marketing and public affairs campaigns rely on stakeholder mapping as a planning tool. Frameworks such as Mendelow’s Power-Interest Matrix, which categorises stakeholders by their level of power and interest, and Mitchell et al.’s Stakeholder Salience Model, which considers power, legitimacy and urgency, remain invaluable. They help us identify which stakeholders matter, how to prioritise them, and where to focus engagement.

These frameworks are far from outdated. They remain fundamental to understanding stakeholder relationships. The challenge is that we sometimes apply them as though influence is fixed.

Increasingly, it isn’t.

Influence is rarely static

Recent employee campaigns, activist movements, and ESG-related controversies have shown that influence often develops through communication among customers, investors, employees, and the wider public, rather than through formal authority alone.

At first glance, grassroots campaigners or online communities may appear to have limited organisational power. Yet they can become highly influential by building coalitions, mobilising public support, attracting media attention and reframing issues in ways that resonate with wider audiences.

Influence is often something that develops over time rather than something stakeholders simply possess. Our challenge is not only to understand who holds influence today, but who is likely to gain it tomorrow.

This matters because one of our responsibilities is to anticipate changing stakeholder expectations before they become organisational risks. If our stakeholder maps focus only on today’s power structures, we risk missing tomorrow’s influential voices.

Treat stakeholder mapping as a living process

This doesn’t mean abandoning traditional stakeholder mapping. It means using it differently. Rather than treating stakeholder maps as static documents produced at the beginning of a project, we should view them as living assessments of an evolving stakeholder environment.

Alongside questions about power and interest, communicators should ask which stakeholders are becoming more visible, who is building alliances, which issues are creating new coalitions and who is influencing public debate regardless of formal authority. By asking these questions, we’re acknowledging that influence is dynamic and can increase, decrease or shift between stakeholder groups as issues develop.

Perhaps more importantly, communicators should spend more time examining the relationships between stakeholders than assessing them individually. Influence rarely develops in isolation. It emerges through networks of organisations, campaign groups, employees, investors and communities working towards shared objectives. Understanding those relationships often provides a better indication of where influence is heading than assessing stakeholders one by one.

Look beyond power

As organisations face increased scrutiny, understanding influence has become just as important as understanding power.

Traditional stakeholder frameworks remain an essential starting point, but they were never designed to predict every shift in stakeholder behaviour. This is where professional judgement becomes critical.

Engine No. 1’s success illustrates the point. Its defining strength was not formal power – it still owned only around 0.02% of ExxonMobil’s shares – but its ability to build alliances, reshape the debate and persuade others to act. Its influence. Its influence evolved.

That is the lesson for communication professionals. We should not stop asking who holds the most power. But we should spend just as much time asking who is building influence. Those are not always the same stakeholders, and recognising the difference is what will keep stakeholder mapping relevant.

Chartered PR practitioner Martin Deakin is a senior account manager at Stone Junction, which is a corporate affiliate member of the CIPR. Alongside his professional work, he is a practitioner-researcher exploring stakeholder influence, corporate communication and public affairs. His research and published work are available via his Google Scholar profile.

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