In today’s interconnected world, a company’s success doesn’t just depend on its products—it depends on the people it impacts. These people are called stakeholders—anyone who can affect or be affected by your organization’s actions.
Whether you’re a corporate leader, comms director, or brand strategist, understanding your stakeholders and engaging them effectively is critical to maintaining your license to operate, shaping your public image, and earning long-term trust.
This guide breaks down everything you need to know about stakeholders: who they are, how they’re categorized, and why intelligent stakeholder management is the backbone of reputation success.
Stakeholders are people, groups, or institutions that can affect or be affected by an organization’s objectives, operations, and outcome.
A stakeholder is any individual or group with a legitimate interest in a company’s decisions and activities. Stakeholders influence the business, and in return, are influenced by it—positively or negatively.
Stakeholders aren’t just limited to shareholders or customers. From NGOs and regulators to your own employees, the list is long and growing in complexity.
Understanding the difference between internal and external stakeholders helps businesses craft more tailored and effective engagement strategies.
These are individuals who operate within the organization. They are directly involved in the day-to-day functioning and success of the business.
Employees
Executives and Managers
Board Members
Shareholders
These are groups or individuals outside the organization who still hold an interest in how it operates.
Customers
Regulators and Government Agencies
NGOs and Advocacy Groups
Media
Communities
Business Partners and Suppliers
Another helpful distinction is between primary and secondary stakeholders:
These groups have a direct impact on, and are directly affected by, the company’s success. Without them, the business wouldn’t function.
Employees exchange labor for salary and are most concerned with being paid and retaining their jobs. Other basic expectations include workplace safety and concern for employee health.
However, employees are also concerned with how they identify with corporate values and the overall purpose of the company, e.g., policies on equality, diversity, and environment.
Customers buy the company’s products and services. They primarily care about quality, value for money, customer service, and innovation.
In addition, customers are also concerned with the company’s legitimacy and license to operate, as well as its overall impact on society.
Suppliers deliver goods or services to the company.
They are interested in increasing their own business and are mostly concerned with getting a good price for their product or service, increasing the volume of engagement, and stability of interaction.
Management includes those with area or people responsibility inside the company. They are important for delivering on the strategy and ensuring buy-in from employees.
Managers care about clarity and transparency of the company’s overall direction, and about having good conditions for their team to deliver strong results, as well as being able to attract talent.
The board of directors is mainly interested in the successful performance of the business, focusing on increasing profits and attracting and retaining investors.
Alongside their legal responsibility, they are also concerned about governance and ethics issues.
Shareholders and investors are interested in getting a return on their investment in the company.
They are primarily concerned with increasing sales volume, cutting costs, and maximizing growth; however, they are also concerned with elements that could cause a sudden decrease in the value of their investment, i.e., crises related to things like compliance, fraud, CEO misconduct, environmental scandals, and others, meaning that they are also interested in proactive initiatives from the company on these matters.
These groups are not directly engaged in the business’s economic activities but still play a key role in shaping its social license to operate.
The general public encompasses all stakeholders but also represents a broadly defined separate entity that can also be referred to as ‘society’.
The public wants the company to do well by doing good, to abide by legislation, be a good employer, and be a good corporate citizen that takes responsibility for its role in society.
Those are people working at official bodies mostly concerned with the company’s obligations around legal compliance as a corporate entity and as an employer.
The relationship is both reactive and proactive from the corporate perspective, as influencing this stakeholder group can create better operational conditions for the company.
Talent represents potential employees within the company’s relevant professional fields.
This group typically has similar expectations to the company as existing employees; however, they are often more critical of the company as they do not understand the corporate strategy and targets to the same degree.
NGOs are typically non-profit entities focused on singular topics, often related to the environment, communities, and human rights.
Expectations from these groups are largely value-based. These groups can be politically and publicly active and vocal, often attracting media attention to issues related to CSR.
Media includes all communication outlets, journalists, and bloggers that are independent of the company.
Expectations from this stakeholder group can vary with the special interest of the media outlet in question.
Common for all are expectations of transparency, accessibility, clarity in communication, and availability of spokespeople for commentary. They often act as amplifiers – or multipliers – by broadening the reach of information to other stakeholders and drawing their attention.
These are the most important and vocal individual experts in fields of interest for the company.
They can be sector professionals, academics, analysts, politically active individuals or other visible or influential people in relevant ways.
These stakeholders are important to monitor as they often influence the opinions of others.
Today’s stakeholders are more empowered than ever. A single misstep—whether ethical, environmental, or political—can be amplified across social and traditional media, instantly impacting your reputation and bottom line.
Engaged stakeholders = Trusted brand.
Companies that actively engage stakeholders:
Build long-term trust
Prevent crises
Adapt faster to market shifts
Foster internal alignment
Improve ESG and DE&I perceptions
Secure their social license to operate
1. Identify and Map Your Stakeholders
Use a stakeholder map to categorize stakeholders by interest and influence. Consider internal vs external and primary vs secondary.
2. Understand Their Needs
What do they care about? What do they expect from your company? This insight should inform your communications and strategic decisions.
3. Define Clear Engagement Goals
Whether you’re aiming to build trust, improve transparency, or increase loyalty—set KPIs around each.
4. Communicate Transparently
Use data-backed messaging. Stakeholders respond best to transparency, consistency, and accountability.
5. Monitor and Adjust
Stakeholder perceptions shift fast. Tools like Caliber’s Real-Time Tracker help you stay one step ahead.
Any company’s stakeholder landscape should be considered dynamic. While some stakeholder groups will always remain relevant, new ones should be considered from time to time with certain events or topics making them relevant for the company to include in a measurement setup – in order to understand perceptions of these groups.
Below, we provide a guide on how to consistently map and monitor the relevant stakeholder universe in an effective way.
1. Divide stakeholders into primary and secondary stakeholders
The first thing to do is to create a general overview of your company’s stakeholders. Define a list of consistently relevant stakeholders, as well as those who might occasionally become relevant. Divide them into primary and secondary stakeholders.
2. Map stakeholders through the lens of importance
Not all stakeholders are of equal importance to the company. Therefore, you should determine the importance of your stakeholders by assessing them on two parameters: Power (Influence they have on the company’s ability to operate) and Interest (Impact of the company’s actions on them).
3. Apply the current business context
Detailing the current business context with each stakeholder is important to determine if the stakeholder in question should be monitored on an ongoing basis or around specific events.
4. Define stakeholder knowledge level
Define how the stakeholders know the company and which topics they care about, how they might experience the topic from their perspective, and then how to mitigate a potential knowledge gap. Actively monitoring stakeholder perceptions can help you understand if your efforts towards a certain stakeholder are serving to bridge any gaps in understanding.
5. Determine KPIs for each stakeholder
Setting perception targets for stakeholders is important to internally agree on what success looks like within a defined period. It also helps in gauging how well your efforts are resonating with a particular group.
6. Measure perceptions and use results to plan and communicate
After creating a strong foundation for the tracking setup, it is time to measure perceptions. Here it is recommended to have consistency in tracking, reporting, and clearly communicating stakeholder insights internally so the tracking becomes a relevant tool to understand and improve the corporate reputation.
7. Build an accessible and integrated data infrastructure to maximize activation
Reputation data should be continuous and digitally accessible so that many end-users within the company can benefit from these insights and integrate them with other continuous data sources. Make sure you build an open platform that all relevant markets and functions can access, and integrate it with your internal Business Intelligence tools if such are in existence.
Defining which stakeholders matter to you and why is a crucial exercise when setting up your reputation monitoring. Essentially, it is about mapping out your stakeholders and identifying their desired behavior towards the company, which would allow it to achieve its goals.
Once this is done, you should define the tracking setup in terms of the data points and KPIs you wish to track for each stakeholder, as well as how often you would like to review and assess results.
Caliber believes that stakeholder monitoring should be ongoing and in real-time, which allows you to measure the impact of activities and events on stakeholder perceptions.
Unlike media monitoring or biannual reputation surveys, real-time stakeholder intelligence tracks what people really think—right now.
With platforms like Caliber, you can:
Measure brand trust and perception continuously
Segment data by geography, demographic, or stakeholder group
Identify and act on potential issues before they escalate
This is not guesswork. It’s stakeholder science—at scale.
Engaging stakeholders isn’t a side task. It’s core to business success. By truly listening to those who matter most—customers, employees, communities, and investors—you build a more trusted, resilient brand.
Stakeholders are not just audiences. They are partners in your business journey. And the companies that recognize this early? They’re the ones that win—today and in the future.
What is a stakeholder in business?
A stakeholder is any individual, group, or organization that can affect or be affected by a company’s operations, decisions, and outcomes.
What is the difference between a stakeholder and a shareholder?
A stakeholder has any kind of interest in the company’s activities (e.g., employees, customers, communities), while a shareholder specifically owns part of the company through shares and is focused on financial returns.
What are the five key stakeholder groups?
The key stakeholder groups are internal stakeholders (such as employees and management) and external stakeholders (such as customers, investors, regulators, and the general public).
Why is stakeholder engagement important?
Effective stakeholder engagement builds trust, strengthens reputation, helps prevent crises, and ensures long-term business sustainability.
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