Turnaround Strategy:

A turnaround strategy is a act of turning a loss-making company into a profit-making one. Turning your company into a profit-making one once again usually requires a complete renewal of your corporation by identifying what the root failure cause is.

There are turnaround managers who stay in companies for the time needed to change the organization around.

The stages required in a turnaround are:

1. The evaluation and assessment stage
2. The acute needs stage
3. The restructuring stage
4. The stabilization stage
5. The revitalization stage

The techniques to remedy the downfall are:

Retrenchment
Repositioning
Replacement
Renewal

Subliminal messaging

Subliminal messaging is the use of stimuli to influence a person into believing something without the person being aware.

Subliminal messaging can be done through:


Visual

This is done by showing pictures that will change the viewers attitude. Humans respond to different colours, words, geometric shapes in different ways and it raises a feeling or emotion.
Different cultures however have different meanings for colours and shapes, for example white would never be used in a Chinese wedding as it symbolizes death. Some shapes, can raise sexual arousal while others are intrusive.

Auditory

Auditory stimuli is not as affective as visual but it too can have an effect. Self help audio recordings for example all use a similar tone of voice which is meant to persuade the listener into thinking positively.

Other studies have been done on baroque music and other forms of classical music that evokes the memory and allows the listener to remember an advert better.

A third, less commonly used subliminal message is smells. In America, they sell a can of "freshly baked cookies" smell which real estate agents can spray around a house to induce a feeling in the buyers that a family could live there, bake cookies and be happy.

Subliminal messaging is illegal, however regular advertising which could use similar visual or auditory stimuli are legal. You cannot have a coke bottle pop up for a millisecond on a screen but you can show how drinking coke could change your life because you are aware you're watching an advert.

KFC for example hid a message in one of their adverts and whoever cracked it, won a free gift certificate. This got people to watch the KFC advert much more often than they actually would, instilling their brand in our heads.

Corona beer has never traditionally used lime in its beer until a bartender came up with the trick. Now we associate lime and beer with Corona, every time.

Social Media

The buzzword "social media" is the process of gaining website traffic or attention through social media sites like Facebook or LinkedIn for example.

Social media usually works by attracting the attention of the viewers, creating interesting content and persuading people to share the links. Social media is the new word of mouth. Social media marketing is also considered "earned media" rather than "paid media" as you need traffic to get attention to the site.

Social media also uses a lot of "link baiting" which in my opinion shouldn't be used on news channels for example as its only purpose is to get people to click on the links just to get a bit of information. Some examples might be, "This dog was let out and you will never guess what happens NEXT!". They make people click on them because even if we didn't care about what happens next, we need to know. It becomes rather distasteful when CNN uses link baiting which could say, "This bomb fell on Tehran, you'll never guess what happens next!".

Purpose of social media:

The purpose of social media to create the products and services of a company more accessible by putting them on a medium which is easily discovered and viewed by all sorts of people.

Implementing a social media strategy:

Define your goals
You need to decide as a business what you want to achieve out of social media, what are your goals or general branding purpose? Do you want to interact with your audience or would you like to promote a new product or coupon?

Know your audience
It is important, like in all forms of marketing to understand your audience. This way you can create a marketing plan that targets that specific audience and captures their attention. If you market a car to people who enjoy cycling, you are just wasting valuable resources.

 Platform
 In addition to knowing you audience, you need to know which platform that specific audience uses. If it's a business to business advertisement it may be better to use LinkedIn. Also, things like job applications are also important to put on LinkedIn rather than Facebook to get the people that the business actually wants.

If you want to gain recognition or just to announce what is happening in your business, twitter is a good tool for that. Twitter allows you to link a few aspects to the main point of your advertisement or announcement. 

Plan your content and maintain it
It is important to have planned content, this way you can build on that content if it becomes viral or popular on the internet. It is vital to create a plan instead of willy nilly putting up things just for the sake of getting a couple of views.

While you have planned your content, this content should be updated continuously which keeps the potential customers informed and keen in the products.

To achieve a good plan and well kept upkeep it may be a good idea to hire a social media manager. Social media is a very effective way to promote your business and if done right you can get a lot out of it at a relatively low cost.

Media Agencies

Media agencies make sure a marketing message appeals to consumers, appears in the right place, at the right time and that the advertiser pays the best possible price.

Media agencies are a third party contractor that a company hires to find the best possible options for a company to promote their product or service.

Tasks:

It is the media agencies task to find the most effective way of targeting a specific audience. The contracting party usually tells them who they want to target and with what product or service. It is then the media agencies task to find out which medium to use to get the message to the target audience the most effectively.

Media agencies try to understand consumer behavior and this way they can use their knowledge to help them. The media agency is in close contact with the client and their brand directors in order to get that same brand message across through all their contact with customers.

Benefits:

Media agencies allow companies to really understand the behavior of their customers. By outsourcing the above mentioned tasks they can safely asume that majority of whom they have wanted to reach, have been reached.

Media agencies also understand the latest in media technology. What trends to follow and which to avoid, for example promoting yourself on MySpace circa 2004 was probably seen as a pretty bad idea but that may have not been clear to many companies.

Media agencies understand who is following which media and they can use this to their benefit. It's also a cost saver as pumping money into a media channel that isn't followed by your target audience would be wasteful.

Deals, media agencies know where to buy ad space and at what costs. Like everything, experience allows you to make smarter decisions and this also holds water when purchasing something.

Disadvantages:

Of course, media agencies can be set in their own ways too. It can be detrimental to a company to outsource a media agency that constantly does the same thing for clients. Rinse & repeat doesn't work anymore, there are too many different ways of gaining information and it's vital to have knowledge in who is using what.

Intramedia: Between 
Intermedia: Within

How to develop a communication plan?

A communication plan is a road map for getting your message across to your audience. The plan is an essential tool of marketing as it will improve your ability to achieve the desired outcome.

Different ways to communicate your message are:

• Word of mouth
• News stories in both print and broadcast media
• Press releases and press conferences
• Posters, brochures, and fliers
• Outreach and presentations to other health and community service providers and to community groups and organizations
• Special events and open houses that your organization holds

You need to consider the following questions when developing the communication plan:

• Why do you want to communicate with the community?  (What’s your purpose?)
• Whom do you want to communicate it to?  (Who’s your audience?)
• What do you want to communicate?  (What’s your message?)
• How do you want to communicate it?  (What communication channels will you use?)
• Whom should you contact and what should you do in order to use those channels?  (How will you actually distribute your message?)

The steps to creating the plan are:

1. Identify the purpose of your communication
2. Identify your audience
3. Plan and design your message
4. Consider your resources
5. Plan for obstacles and emergencies
6. Strategize how you’ll connect with the media and others who can help you spread your message
7. Create an action plan
8. Decide how you’ll evaluate your plan and adjust it, based on the results of carrying it out

Why is the communications plan important for a company?

• A plan will make it possible to target your communication accurately. It gives you a structure to determine whom you need to reach and how.
• A plan can be long-term, helping you map out how to raise your profile and refine your image in the community over time.
• A plan will make your communication efforts more efficient, effective, and lasting.
• A plan makes everything easier. If you spend some time planning at the beginning of an effort, you can save a great deal of time later on, because you know exactly what you should be doing at any point in the process.

Brand Strategy

Brand strategy is a long-term plan for the development of a successful brand in order to achieve specific goals. A brand strategy should be well executed and affect all aspects of the business as everything the business is engaged with can affect the brand. The brand strategy should be directly connected to consumer needs, emotions and competitive environments.

Your brand strategy should implement what your company wants or what its goal is. A company that is gaining a new audience will have a different brand strategy to a company that is entering a competitive market.

Value of Brand Strategy

Branding will help you stand out from your competition. Creating a strong brand image will automatically have an effect on your consumer, whether it is a business or an end consumer. The image that the consumer gets from interacting with your business is very important, as they say "first impressions are crucial!" This first impression or the "image" that the consumer gains when interacting with your company will be one that they carry with them through the entirety of your business together. It is easy to give a bad impression but difficult to change that into a positive one, alternatively a good brand image can give a lot of leeway and give the consumer the impression that a mistake made is just a one-off thing.

Different Brand Strategy

Brand extension is a branding strategy that uses an existing brand name to promote a new or improved product. This can be a risky strategy, people are aware of what the brand offers with their original product but if you continue to dilute the brand name with a wide array of products then the consumers may not be aware of your purpose anymore.

Brand licensing is a legal licensing agreements that allows companies to use the brand of others in their products or services. The party giving out the rights to use the logo or brand will usually be paid in royalties. This can be risk if you license to companies that don't have the same values as your company. Take Rovio for example, they are the licensing kings of Finland at the moment but it would be very unlikely to be able to purchase Angry Bird condoms because safe sex doesn't relate to the children's game and cartoon characters.

Co-branding combines one or more brands in the creation of a product or service. Kolmen kaverin jäätelö for example have joined in with Paulig to co-brand their new coffee flavored ice cream.

Importance

Using the different strategies is fine and great IF it correlates to the earlier mentioned aspects of the brand strategy creation. Your company has to stand for something, have a goal toward something and all things that the company does have to be a part of it.

A good brand can achieve:

- Clear message to consumers

- Credibility

- Connects to your target groups emotionally

- Motivates buyer

- Concretes user loyalty

Outside-In Strategy

Outside-In strategy has been used since the creation of brands or probably the creation of products. It is where the entity making the products listens to the consumers wants and needs and then tries their best to cater to these. The best brand is then, the one that caters to all the needs of the consumer.

This is a very old school way of thinking and personally I think it's outdated. If you get people from all walks of life telling you how your brand should be then there will never be a clear vision of what the owners of the company want and in which direction they want to go, instead it is just pleasing a bunch of people on the surface so that they would purchase a product.

There is the risk that you cannot deliver on the promise which you make the consumer. This would just make the consumer more agitated that you listened to their need and now you cannot fulfill this need.

Inside-Out Strategy

 Inside-Out is a more modern, long-term and concrete brand strategy. The creators of the brand identify where the company wants to go with the brand and what their values are. This then correlates in all their products and services that they provide.

This form of strategy is much more sincere and people love honesty and sincerity. If you change your mind just to please someone else it may work for a while but overall you will be seen as a weaker person for it. 

People can strand behind a company that has a clear vision in where they are going that is driven by their passion.

Brand Identity and Image

It's important to understand the difference between identity and image before going deeper into theory.

Brand identity is how a company wants to be perceived to the world. It stems from their mission/vision and their values.

Brand image on the other hand is how the public view the corporation. 

So in layman's terms, the brand identity is the ideal view of the company and the image is the actual reality. Below are two bubbles which show some keywords related to the identity and image to give a clearer understanding of how they differ from one another.

There are several different models used to help build up and clearly structure the brand identity. David A. Aaker, a marketing professor at the University of California-Berkeley believes that brand management should start with determining the brand identity, which he believes consists of the following elements:

• Brand as Product - Brand as product consists of the attributes, quality or value, uses, users and country of origin
• Brand as Organisation -consists of organizational attributes, local workings and global activities
• Brand as Person - Consumer brand relationship and personality
• Brand as Symbol - Audio and visual imagery

This model is meant to aid in the creation of a comprehensive brand identity. All these elements have to be linked to one another, with the one consistent message and that is what Aaker believes will build a strong brand which people can trust in.


Kapferer was the first person to talk about brand identity and created the brand identity prism. Here there are six aspects of the brand which are evaluated to create a holistic and wholly comprehensive brand. Below you can see the different elements of the famous brand Heineken, there are a lot of similarities between the elements which is key to a strong brand where all aspects have the same core values.

It's important to evaluate how the company's identity and its image differ from one another. There was a case in Great Britain where the Royal Mail had a terrible percieved image when their actual operations were one of the best if not the best in the world with a ridiculously high % of mail sent on time. Let's say it was 95%. The problem was that the percieved image of the Royal Mail was that they never send anything on time or to the right address, so in order to remedy this the Royal Mail decided to increase their already high % by concentrating on better transportation, tracking and any other forms of expensive logistic devices to raise that % as high as they could.

After they had thrown millions of pounds into bettering their already great operations the study was re-conducted and their perceived value was still rubbish. This shows the importance of what the brand Identity is, what they want the people to believe of their company and how the message should be sent across.

Another case was the train connection between London and Paris through the channel tunnel , which took let's say 2 hours and 30 minutes. The railway company decided that they wanted to better their image and they came up with the idea of re-engineering their train tracks in order to get the customers from  A to B faster. Six billion euros was thrown at this project and when they released the new train which was about 30 minutes faster their image didn't really change. Instead of dropping huge sums of money for a minor change they could have installed game consoles into the existing chairs or waiting staff throughout the trip and their image or perceived value would have risen by much more as the consumers would feel they are being pampered.

The bottom line is, it's important to understand the difference and importance of Identity and Image.

Visual Brand Identity

The visual identity of a company is not the brand, the visual identity of a company uses aspects of the company like colors/shapes and makes visual relations to the brand platform, in order to create the one universal message to people that will be in contact with the company.

Visual identity is how you “package your brand”. Your brand platform, or the brand itself, is what the company stands for and its ideals. The visual identity “package” is how you convey these ideas to the public.

For visual identity to be successful there are a few key elements which need to be in check.

1. The visual identity must have personality. Without personality the people that are in contact with the logos or other aspects of the visual branding won’t feel a connection to the image or see the connection between the image and the company values.

2.  Recognisability is crucial to the success of the visual identity. Those glass coke bottles for example, they don’t need the contents in them or a label saying coke yet everyone will identify it as being a coke bottle.

3. Consistency is extremely important. Consistent message and consistent look. People often see change as a bad thing, and this can be seen in logos. For example Google changing the placement of their letter e by a few millimeters caused an uproar.

PBL 2

Storytelling & Corporate Communication

What is corporate communication?

Corporate communication is a set of activities involved in managing and orchestrating all internal and external communications aimed at creating favorable point of view among stakeholders on which the company depends (Fombrun, 2007). 

Corporate communication is the tool used to keep up dialogue between corporation and stakeholders. It is the link between the corporation and all entities involved in order to achieve its planned objective as the corporation cannot achieve this on its own.

Corporate communication stems from two fields, internal and external communication.

Up until the late 70’s the term public relations was used to describe communication with stakeholders. Corporate communication was turned into a tool when internal and external stakeholders started demanding more information about the company.

The diagram shows how the different forms of corporate communication are divided and linked together. Each of these factors are equally important as they affect the companies image.

Who are stakeholders?

A stakeholder is a person, group or entity that has interest or concern in an organization. Stakeholders are often affected by the organizations actions but it doesn’t necessarily mean they own shares or have any capital invested in the organization. Stakeholders can be creditors, employees, suppliers, owners, unions and the community. This also works vice-versa, all entities that can affect an organization are stakeholders.

Identifying and grouping stakeholders is increasingly difficult as it is relative to the objective at hand. For example an employee with shares may view corporate cost-cutting completely different to an employee without shares (Hutt, 2010). Categorizing stakeholders is essential as too much

 Stakeholder engagement is crucial to a firms success as no firm lives in isolation and while dialogue is not new between stakeholder and corporation, it is rising to be a crucial part of success with respect to business strategy (The Future 500, 2007).

How to communicate with stakeholders?

Identifying the best stakeholders to communicate with is crucial, however actually communicating with them and keeping them involved is another issue. When targeting each of your stakeholder groups you need to identify the following things:

-          Who the stakeholders are and at what level do they need to be involved?

-          What are the needs and interests of each stakeholder?

-          How do you communicate with each stakeholder, what method?

-          Frequency of communication

Communication and transparency however aren’t the only ingredients required for a good relationship between stakeholders and organization.  Ipsos MORI, Social Research Institute wrote a paper where they explained the importance of stakeholders and why the public sector is struggling because of their lack of stakeholder understanding.

Above is a diagram which shows the similarities in companies which have a very strong relationship with their stakeholders. For example Apple and Toyota (2009). A bad company with weak leadership and unclear goals cannot achieve a good relationship with their stakeholders, making communication with them irrelevant. 

Effective storytelling

Storytelling is becoming more important in the corporate world when communicating with stakeholders. The old way of introducing a product and marketing the product by showing off specs and new technology isn't enough to persuade stakeholders to get excited about the business.

Through storytelling, corporations can effectively inspire others by engaging stakeholders' emotions. Stakeholders will remember the story and the objectives connected to it, thus inspiring them to help achieve this goal if the story is well told. Adverts, like the Google advert which reunites two old friends make corporations seem humane and approachable. 

It is however important to have an effective story, one that people can relate to and see value in. This can backfire drastically if the story is off, for example the advert from Samsung which tries to promote their smart watch. It tells a story of how the guy gets the girl because he can do cool things with his smart watch. It is exaggerated which makes it difficult to relate to and this makes the viewer see little value in the product. The situations that are presented in this advert are ones that just wouldn't happen, ever. 

That video is a great example of corporate storytelling gone wrong.

References:

Riel, Cees B.M. van; Fombrun, Charles J. (2007). Essentials Of Corporate Communication: Abingdon & New York: Routledge

Roger W. Hutt, (2010),"Identifying and mapping stakeholders: an industry case study"

The Future 500 (2007), “Stakeholder engagement”