Replace SWOT with SWT

SWOT - Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats - is the industry standard for situational analysis. I learned about it in secondary school which, in hindsight, was probably the first clue that it’s not fit for purpose.

There are three major weaknesses of the tool (and several more weaknesses that come from how it’s typically used):

1. Most marketing agencies don’t actually know what their strengths and weaknesses are, because most agency management teams consist of people with narrow experience: the typical agency management team consists mostly of people who’ve had one or two jobs prior to joining the agency, sometimes in management. Most of us honestly don’t know where we’re lagging (and, conversely, we tend to assume that all the other agencies have things figured out, because that’s what all the other agencies post on LinkedIn - obviously this isn’t the case). For this reason, it helps to bring on an independent third party to facilitate a discussion like this…but, I would say that, so bear with.
2. We sell expertise (people, or time, if you’re being unkind) rather than manufacturing things, so a lot of the things that could be either strengths or weaknesses are quite conceptual, like “culture”. The relatively high adoption of remote work in agencies makes “culture” particularly difficult to assess objectively, so it’s important that we solicit opinions from the full business, especially minority groups, and reserve management time for discussing what we should do about the opinions, rather than spending all our time generating the opinions in the first place. Use pre-existing HR initiatives (or coincide new ones) to gather input from the wider business and feed this into the exercise instead.
3. Almost everything that could go in the Opportunities section could also be considered a threat, and vice versa (e.g. AI - it’s probably both, for pretty much every agency). This is where SWT comes in.

An SWT analysis - Strengths, Weaknesses, Trends - encourages our management teams to think bigger than our immediate channels. Instead of Opportunities and Threats, which come pre-packaged with recommendations (baggage), we talk about Trends, and discuss whether what’s going on in the world is likely to affect us, and when. Instead of hedging against specific actions undertaken by particular players as Threats (“is Google going to deprecate third party cookes?”), we are encouraged to think about the general direction of travel (“are the current ways we measure effectiveness going to need to change?”)

Thinking about Trends encourages us to think about what’s going on in the wider world, rather than “inside out”. It particularly encourages us to think about what affects our clients - not just our agency. If a trend continues, what will our clients need from us that they don’t need right now?

Our Strengths and Weaknesses aren’t likely to change (at least, not without effort). Trends (that is, significant changes in distribution, technology, product innovation, markets, consumers and social trends) are constantly moving, which suggests that we should be revisiting this exercise more often than once a year. I’d recommend making it a feature at least once per quarter: schedule an hour; pull up the SWT with your management team; ask “what’s changed?” and see the difference in your approach.