Stakeholder types define the people and groups that can affect or be affected by your organization’s actions—those whose perceptions and influence ultimately shape your company’s success in today’s interconnected world.
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 or vested interest interest in a company’s decisions and activities. Stakeholders influence the business, and in return, are influenced by it—positively or negatively.
There are many types of stakeholders, including primary stakeholders such as employees, customers, and investors, as well as internal and external stakeholders like regulators, NGOs, and community groups. Understanding these distinctions is critical for effective stakeholder analysis and for managing healthy stakeholder relationships that support long-term business success.
Understanding the difference between internal stakeholders and external stakeholders helps businesses craft more tailored and effective engagement strategies.Â
Both groups influence business operations in different ways, and organizations need to focus on managing stakeholder relationships to balance competing priorities.
Internal stakeholders are individuals who operate within the organization. They are directly involved in the day-to-day functioning and long-term success of the business. Their decisions have a direct impact on strategy and execution.Â
Project managers, for example, often act as a bridge between internal stakeholders and external stakeholders, ensuring alignment across departments and with outside partners.
Key internal stakeholders include:
External stakeholders are groups or individuals outside the organization who still hold a vested interest in how it operates. They can influence brand reputation, compliance, and growth, making them just as critical as internal stakeholders. For this reason, project managers frequently engage with external stakeholders to anticipate risks, meet expectations, and strengthen stakeholder relationships.
Key external stakeholders include:
Ultimately, success depends on balancing the needs of internal stakeholders with the expectations of external stakeholders. Effective communication, proactive engagement, and skilled project managers are essential to managing external stakeholders’ relationships in a way that drives sustainable growth.
Read more: Setting and applying KPIs for managing stakeholder perceptions
Another helpful distinction is between primary and secondary stakeholders. This classification helps organizations understand stakeholder dynamics more effectively, identify critical relationships, and know which groups are most directly affected by business outcomes.
These groups have a direct impact on, and are directly affected by, the company’s success. Without them, the business wouldn’t function. They usually hold a financial stake in how the organization performs, making them among the most significant influence in decision-making.
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 company’s overall social and political status.
Customers buy the company’s products and services. They primarily care about quality, value for money, customer service, and innovation. At the same time, they evaluate how the company interacts with local communities and whether it demonstrates responsibility beyond profit.
Suppliers deliver goods or services to the company.
They are interested in stability, volume of engagement, and profitability. Because they form part of the stakeholders involved in daily operations, they can either strengthen or strain critical relationships that affect long-term growth.
Management includes those with area or people responsibility inside the company. Managers play a vital role in aligning the needs of identified stakeholders, ensuring buy-in from employees, and helping the organization gain support from both internal and external stakeholders.
The board focuses on governance, ethics, and profitability. They also oversee stakeholder relationships to ensure the company maintains credibility while balancing performance goals with accountability.
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.
Secondary stakeholders are not directly engaged in economic activities but still exert significant influence over the company’s social and political status. They often shape the broader environment in which the business operates, making them important to understanding stakeholders holistically.
The public expects companies to act responsibly, follow regulations, and contribute positively to local communities. Their perceptions can determine whether a company gains or loses its social license to operate.
Government agencies regulate compliance, legal standards, and industry practices. They are critical stakeholders involved in oversight, and companies often must gain support from them to secure favorable operational conditions.
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.
These organizations, often focused on environment, human rights, or local communities, can shape stakeholder dynamics by mobilizing public opinion. Their advocacy often holds companies accountable for their social and political status.
Media includes all communication outlets, journalists, and bloggers that are independent of the company. Media outlets amplify messages, bringing visibility to both corporate successes and failures. They maintain relationships with other groups by influencing public trust and stakeholder confidence.
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 experts and public figures have a significant influence on public perception and policy debates. Monitoring and engaging with them is essential to understanding stakeholders and anticipating reputational risks.
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:
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
Use a stakeholder map to categorize stakeholders by interest and influence. Consider internal vs external and primary vs secondary.
What do they care about? What do they expect from your company? This insight should inform your communications and strategic decisions.
Whether you’re aiming to build trust, improve transparency, or increase loyalty—set KPIs around each.
Use data-backed messaging. Stakeholders respond best to transparency, consistency, and accountability.
Stakeholder perceptions shift fast. Tools like Caliber’s Real-Time Tracker help you stay one step ahead.
Read also: 7 stakeholder management tips
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.Â
Actively monitoring stakeholder KPIs like stakeholder perception can help you understand if your efforts towards a certain stakeholder are serving to bridge any gaps in understanding.
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.
After creating a strong foundation for the tracking setup, it is time to measure perceptions.Â
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.
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.Â
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.Â
Caliber believes that stakeholder perception tracking 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 Caliber’s platforms, you can:
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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.
A former editor at the Associated Press, James drives Caliber's storytelling around the fast-emerging field of stakeholder intelligence — exploring how companies can harness real-time data about the people who matter most to their success to make smarter decisions about their brand, reputation, and business strategy.
A stakeholder is any individual, group, or organization that can affect or be affected by a company’s operations, decisions, and outcomes.
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.
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The key stakeholder groups are internal stakeholders (such as employees and management) and external stakeholders (such as customers, investors, regulators, and the general public).
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Shareholders are individuals or organizations that own shares in a company, meaning they have a financial interest in its performance. Because their wealth is directly tied to the company’s profitability and long-term success, they are considered key stakeholders.
However, the stakeholder concept goes beyond ownership. It includes anyone affected by the company’s actions — such as employees, customers, suppliers, and local communities.
In a Danish or broader European context, where corporate governance emphasizes transparency and social responsibility, shareholders are expected not only to seek profits but also to consider environmental, social, and governance (ESG) impacts. This shift reflects how European markets increasingly value responsible stakeholder capitalism over pure shareholder primacy.
bsolutely — customers are among the most important external stakeholders of any company.
Customers influence a company’s revenue, reputation, and long-term sustainability. Their trust determines whether a brand thrives or declines. Because they are directly affected by a company’s products, services, and ethical behavior, they hold significant stakeholder power.
Companies that actively engage customers as stakeholders — by collecting feedback, demonstrating transparency, and aligning values — build stronger reputations and greater loyalty.
Customers increasingly expect brands to act responsibly on sustainability, data privacy, and ethical sourcing, making their stakeholder role even more influential in shaping public perception and corporate reputation.
Stakeholder capitalism is an economic model where companies aim to create value for all stakeholders — not just shareholders.
Instead of focusing solely on short-term profits, stakeholder capitalism prioritizes long-term impact and shared value creation across employees, customers, suppliers, investors, and society.
This model aligns business success with social progress — ensuring that profit, purpose, and people coexist. It’s a key pillar of how modern companies in Europe and especially the Nordics operate, reflecting strong commitments to corporate responsibility, transparency, and trust.
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