Step One: Stakeholders Look at all of the business stakeholders, including employees, shareholders, consumers, and the media. What do they think of the company and its brands? What is it they are looking for from the business? What are their issues and concerns? Stakeholders are a broad group, often with conflicting interests. The Social Business Idea™ resolves these conflicts by identifying a unifying thought that appeals to all of them. Overall, this circle helps answer the question: “What is the issue that stakeholders care about?” Or, in essence, “What do people (in the broadest sense) want?”

Step Two: The Company Conduct a thorough analysis of the company itself, looking at the brand or brands and the company behind the brand. This includes looking at the brand, or brands, and the company behind the brand. What is the company’s history and purpose? What are its key awareness and image measures and relative positions versus its competitors? What are its core beliefs? Where does it want to be? Overall, this circle answers the question: ”What is a genuine and credible role for the company or brand?”

Step Three: The Environment What is the overall environment in which the business is operating, from political to legal, to competitive, to financial? This circle sets out to answer the question: “Given the overall environment in which the company operates, what is the tangible opportunity?”

The Intersection The next step is to craft a concise summary statement for each of the three circles. Based on these clear statements of what stakeholders want, what the business can genuinely deliver, and what the tangible opportunity is, you should work as a group to generate a number of potential strategic ideas, each of which should play to the insights agreed up in the overlap areas. Then test them—both internally and with external audiences—until the single most powerful idea is articulated and agreed upon. This is the Social Business Idea™.