Don’t know where it all goes? Use these tools to analyse the prospects of a media project 

While working on monthly or daily KPI’s, it’s easy to overlook the company’s future prospects. Creating and implementing strategies remain challenging both for aspiring managers and experienced leaders as way too many factors should be taken into account. 

If you struggle to foresee the future of your media project, these classic management tools may offer valuable insights. 

PEST stands for political, economic, social and technological factors that shape the macro-economic environment for a particular undertaking. The well-known 20th century tool, believed to be delivered by a Harvard professor, is widely used for various business units and can sometimes be substituted or enriched by its variables, such as PESTLE or SWOT analysis. For media players in particular it may help identify windows of opportunities (or the absence of the latter), especially after the so-called disruptive innovations or any major changes (e.g. wars, economic crises, political downturns) that have reshaped the market. 

The deeper the aforementioned environmental factors are probed, the better. To be more specific, the tool helps you identify whether technological advances have made your organisation’s core competencies redundant; if the entry barriers for new competitors have been lowered; if the recent policy adjustments by the government have hamstrung your revenue streams and so forth.

Here’s how this tool can be applied, for instance, to analyse the core issues of public broadcasters: 

The success of a company depends upon the economic value it can deliver to its customers. A business has an edge if it creates greater value than the sum of the resources needed for the product and makes it more unique or more affordable than those of its rivals. The value chain analysis introduced by Michael Porter in the 1980s is a great management tool in this regard. It can show what model of expansion – horizontal, vertical or diagonal – makes sense for your organisation and if one’s value chain has been shrunk, fragmented or unbundled by some economic, technological, political or social changes. 

For example, the value chain of a publishing house used to be inextricably linked with in-person sale services, agents’ services and included such competencies as editing and proof-reading. These days, using social media, an author can bypass both agents and publishing houses, build a fanbase online and sell a book via retailers or online platforms directly, unbundling the value chain and depriving a legacy player of its unique competencies once resulting in greater value. 

Here’s how such changes could be described with the help of the tool: 

One more famous Porter’s model is aimed at analysing the rivalry dynamic in the industry, which can be of use for many media practitioners. The five forces mentioned include:

According to the model, a company’s strategy ideally should allow it to challenge bargaining power of both suppliers and customers while preventing new competitors from entering the scene. In short, to analyse a project’s prospects, managers may ask themselves “What do we do that customers still want?“, “What can we still do better than anyone?“, “What should we stop doing?“. 

Getting back to the good-old newspaper industry, here’s how its prime issues would look according to the model: 

The tool emphasises the importance of a firm’s resources and seeks the best way to allocate and leverage them. According to this approach, strategic resources can be knowledge-based (such as authorship, skill sets etc.) or property-based (facilities, production machinery etc.). They also can be categorised as discrete (say, a network of qualified freelancers) or systemic (in case it permeates the entire organisation).

The resources that a business possesses or decides to invest in have to meet the VRIN criteria to be relevant and advantageous:

1. Valuable – a resource has to generate revenue or make a company stand out alongside similar enterprises.


2. Rare rather than standard (a standard considered to be simply necessary to compete, but doesn’t give you an edge).


3. Inimitable, which means difficult to acquire or copy.


4. Non-substitutable – with no freely available or easily accessible analogues. 

If a company manages to get such resources, it has a chance to dominate the market. 

It truly makes sense to look at your media from this angle and ask yourself if it possesses such resources or, alternatively, what should it do to acquire them and which are rather burdensome than strategically important. That said, the model has also been criticised for being hard to apply in the real-life market, since some resources (such as a mindset fostered in a company, workflow habits, culture, etc.) are extremely hard to measure. 

As well as other mentioned tools, this one isn’t a universal remedy and may fail to catch subtle differences in highly dynamic, rapidly changing environments if applied on its own. 

Combined with other managerial tools, however, it may well guarantee a fresh look at your ideas if you haven’t strategised for a while.

Source of the cover photo: https://unsplash.com/