SWOT is nice but tows is better

S.W.O.T. It’s a very common practice taught in Marketing 101 courses in college. Even though it is fairly basic in premise it still to this day is quite useful to have marketing teams work through, especially for a new product launch

But at the end the day a SWOT just leaves you with a list of things that are good or bad with your product and no specific actions to take. It is up to your team to take next steps with a SWOT and turn those lists into learning’s and ultimately actions.

Over the course of my career I have seen lots of use of SWOT but very seldom use of its more useful (IMHO) cousin the TOWS. TOWS, for those not familiar is just a more useful variant of SWOT that takes a next step with the process.

TOWS adds in a look at external factors (mostly affecting Threats and Opportunities) and internal factors (mostly affecting Weaknesses and Strengths). It then attempts to get the group using the process to combine them, matrix-style into strategies the team can use to guide executions.

Not the only next step you can take from a SWOT exercise but I have found TOWS to be quite useful to my marketing teams.

Have a look at the matrix below:

#SWOT #TOWS #MarketingStrategy