Category: Marketing Strategy

Introduction

Green is becoming the mainstream. When the fact that the fashion industry has become the second largest polluting industry, of which fast fashion has made a huge impact (Chavero, 2017), is discovered, many fashion companies which use toxic chemicals, produce lots of waste and pollute the environment have been facing serious problems. To build better brand impression on consumers, promoting a series of marketing strategies which is related to green has become more popular among those companies. This might include advocating green consuming, producing and advertising green products as well as encouraging everyone to lead a green life. Two fast fashion brands, H&M and MUJI, launched fair-trade products and organic collections is a typical example of applying green marketing strategy (Choi et al., 2012). It may somewhat arouse social attention and response. However, the actual effect of these green marketing strategies needs evaluation. This paper will analyze the green marketing strategy in fashion from three stakeholders’ view in detail as well as provide some suggestions on its application.

The stakeholders of green marketing in fashion

The stakeholder theory

“Stakeholder” refers to the individual or group that can affect or is affected by the performance of a company, such as, customers, suppliers, governments, employees and owners (Freeman, 2010). Companies that have a deeper understanding of who their stakeholders are, what they want as well as how they are going to get there, probably have better management skills, which is the main part of stakeholder theory (Frooman,1999). This framework connects the management with business ethics, creating a new method to understand management theory (Parmar et al., 2010).

Parmar et al. (2010) also compare the stakeholder theory to “a genre of management theory” to discuss the variety of uses. It is a framework that can summarize the commonality as well as contain diversity, which means that it allows different uses in various conditions.

Green marketing

According to American Marketing Association (2017), green marketing means that the development and promotion of products is environmentally safe, which includes production, promotion, packaging and reclaiming process. Stanton and Futrell (1987) explain this from the view of purpose —- the activities of green marketing are used to fulfill human needs with the lowest impact on the natural environment. These statements show that the core of green marketing is to protect the environment.

As Bashir, Yousaf and Wani (2016) discussed, green marketing emerged because of people’s concerns about the environment and future of our planet, which then drew the attention of industrialized nations that gave pressure on companies to be ecologically friendly. In recent years, as more consumers start to change their consumption concepts, such as, trusting the brands gradually, regarding services and being more focus on the value (Ottman, 2017), this strategy has become more popular. From the ethic aspect, it is also a tool of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) that can increase profits and competitive advantages of companies (Bashir, Yousaf & Wani, 2016).

Stakeholders of green marketing in fashion

According to Ottman (2017) as well as the definition of stakeholder above, nearly everyone is a stakeholder in green marketing, including, customers, employees, environmentalists, government, investors, children and even the unborn. To facilitate follow-up analysis, the classification of the relevant stakeholders is needed.

Durmaz and Yasar (2016) explain that green marketing idea is developed in companies because of government policies and environmental organization’s pressure, which indicates that company is one of the main stakeholders in green marketing in fashion. The term “company” here contains every entity that is the part of fashion company, including employee, company owner, competitor, supplier, manufacturer and so on.

The starting point of green marketing strategy is protecting the environment, thus the voice of the environmental organization is quite important, for it can give more professional evaluations on the actual effects of green marketing strategy.

Green marketing strategy is a way to gain competitive power for fashion companies, which means that high consumer satisfaction is crucial. Companies satisfy their consumers by meeting their values, providing good services and qualified products. Thus, consumer is also an important cluster that facilitates the generation of green marketing and affects the profits and reputation of fashion company.

In many professional sustainability related papers, government is always considered as a significant stakeholder. However, the role of government in green marketing in fashion is not the point in this paper, for the green marketers usually operate without government assistance and there is no certification for green marketing practitioners (Ottman, 2017).

The analysis of green marketing strategy in fashion based on three stakeholders

Company

The fashion companies that use green marketing strategy can leave socially responsible and environmental concerned impressions to consumers, of which Patagonia is a typical example. Patagonia donates 1% of sales to the grassroots environmental organizations and participates in “1% For the Planet” league and has already provided 89,000,000 dollars to relevant organizations and the number is still growing (Patagonia, 2018). It does not loss money, instead the fashion company shows its care for the environment, thus more people are willing to pay as well as employees have a more comfortable life.

Another kind of example is that the company pay more attention to designs that may convey the environment protection idea, rather than using ecological-friendly materials, such as choosing patchwork as the main motif because patchwork means recycling and reusing. This idea is quite popular among fashion companies today because it can combine fashion and ecology concept without much green cost as well as arouse attention within a certain period, but may be not conductive to the long-term development of green marketing.

One concern from some fashion company is that applying green marketing strategy can somewhat increase the production cost of the products because of using new raw materials, research and development, detection, disposing waste, using some techniques and donations. Because of this, some of them may quit this strategy, while others may try another way—-“greenwashing”.

If a company claims that it uses organic materials, correctly disposes toxic chemicals and follows a sustainable production line, but does not achieve actually, it is called “greenwashing”. This concept refers to companies that overstate their antipollution efforts purposely by providing misinformation to gain more attention from consumers (Zellweger, 2017). This is not a rare green marketing phenomenon in fashion industry today. Take the example of H&M that is cited at the beginning. The company claims that it uses green materials and tries to build a sustainable image. But it is then exposed that it burns 12 tons of redundant clothing every year. The failed green marketing incident like this can decrease the image of the fashion company immensely, may causing the loss of consumer trust. When the fashion company completely regards the green marketing strategy as a tool to earn money, fail to meet consumer’s high expectations and neglect the benefit of environmental organization, it tends to result in serious financial losses (Walker & Wan, 2012).

Environmental organization

There are quite a lot of environmental organizations, some of them devoted in fashion industry, such as Clean Clothes Campaign and Centre for Sustainable Fashion. Although the working directions are different, the aims of these organizations are similar, making improvements to the ecology and human through observations and researches. Environmental organization often serves as a bridge connecting fashion companies and environment. They can supervise the green marketing of companies, whether they meet the emission standards and whether their techniques are effective, and provide some suggestions for them to improve. Fashion companies also donate funds to the organizations to participate in protecting the environment.

Consumer

There are different attitudes among consumers to green marketing, some may support, while others cannot accept or have no feelings. But according to Lee (2011), consumer’s concern to the environment has increased observably during the past few years, which becomes one of the major factors in consumer decision making, indicating that their interests to green marketing is rising. Anguelov (2016) also discusses that consumers have high environmental and social issues awareness. These concerns and awareness somewhat promote the development of green marketing because consumers who have more knowledge about fashion industry prefer to support ethical business practices through their purchases (Shen, Wang, Lo & Shum, 2012). It also makes them easier to identify the facticity of companies’ claims and less likely to be duped, which also pushes the companies to do better (Lee, 2011).

[bookmark: _Hlk24507960]Consumers usually do not simply pay attention to the green garment itself, but focus on every aspect of the fashion company and expect that all of them can accord with “green”, sustainability and responsibility. For example, the situation of sweatshop labor is their most important concern when making apparel purchase decisions (Tomolillo and Shaw, 2004). It is a kind of generalized “green” perception. This phenomenon is might because once the fashion company uses green marketing strategy and advocates being “green”, it declares that it is a responsible company and can arouse close attention from external environment, which can give it pressure to provide better quality clothes to some extent.

Discussions and suggestions

The green marketing strategy in fashion companies today is becoming more popular but not mature. More companies are trying to apply green marketing strategies but only some of them achieve the goals. Despite of the “greenwashing” that discussed above, the appropriate choice of the strategies is also quite significant. When making green marketing strategies, it is necessary to take the target consumer and the brand positioning into consideration. Fashion companies that have different target markets and different positionings can have different choices of green marketing strategies. For most of the common fashion companies, their green marketing strategies usually emphasize on one part of the whole technique, for example, from the raw material aspect, Zara and MUJI use organic cotton, while from the recycle aspect, H&M uses coupons to convince consumers to bring their old clothes instead of throwing them away. Another kind of green marketing is achieving green roundly. Companies like Patagonia keep the “green” concept throughout its production, using recycled plastic, donating funds to environment organizations and recycling old clothes. And by doing green marketing concentratedly, it has a specific loyal customer, even American President is proud of wearing it.

The information that the fashion companies provide should be the truth. Because of the attention from consumer and environmental organizations, “greenwashing” is neither a permanent way to make money for the companies, nor a correct choice to protect the environment. Fashion companies should pay more attention to seek new green marketing strategies, such as developing new materials and production methods and trying new marketing skills.

The environmental organizations should also support green marketing in fashion, and give pressure to the companies to ensure promotion facticity.

Although consumers’ cognitions of green marketing are different, with the improvement of their ecology concerns, green marketing in fashion will receive more attention and support, which is also positive for them to choose green products.

Conclusion

This essay explains the possible effects of application of green marketing strategy to fashion companies, environmental organizations and consumers, providing a reference for the companies to choose proper strategies. Although there might be some problems, such as increasing the production cost and greenwashing, it is certain that the starting point of green marketing is protecting our planet, thus from the sustainable view, the implement of green marketing strategy needs to be deep and abiding. Because of the limitation of statistics and information, this essay may lack of deeper analysis of these three stakeholders. More marketing researches can be conducted in the future to increase the depth. Due to the varying quality of green garments, there are quite a lot of voices of green marketing. No matter what their attitudes are, fashion companies cannot give up because of challenges while environmental organizations and consumers cannot be tired, for the problems have already exposed and it is the time for progress. Only when green marketing is developed healthily can the environment be in a positive cycle.

Reference list:

1. American Marketing Association. (2017). Definitions of Marketing. Retrieved from https://www.ama.org/the-definition-of-marketing-what-is-marketing/
2. Anguelov, N. (2015). The dirty side of the garment industry: Fast fashion and its negative impact on environment and Society. CRC Press.
3. Bashir, M., Yousaf, A., & Wani, A. A. (2016). Green Marketing & CSR: A Proactive & Innovative Tool to Gain Competitive Excellence. Journal of Supply Chain Management Systems, 5(2).
4. Bruce, M., Moore, C., & Birtwistle, G. (Eds.). (2004). International retail marketing: a case study approach. Routledge.
5. Chavero, S. T. (2017). The unsustainability of fast fashion. Datatèxtil, (36), 56-62.
6. Choi, T. M., Lo, C. K., Wong, C. W., Yee, R. W., Shen, B., Wang, Y., & Shum, M. (2012). The impact of ethical fashion on consumer purchase behavior. Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management: An International Journal.
7. Durmaz, Y., & Yaşar, H. V. (2016). Green Marketing and Benefits to Business. Business and Management Studies, 2(2), 64-71.
8. Freeman, R. E. (2010). Strategic management: A stakeholder approach. Cambridge university press.
9. [bookmark: _Hlk23990834]Frooman, J. (1999). Stakeholder influence strategies. Academy of management review, 24(2), 191-205.
10. Lee, S. (2011). Consumers’ value, environmental consciousness, and willingness to pay more toward green-apparel products. Journal of Global Fashion Marketing, 2(3), 161-169.
11. Ottman, J. (2017). The new rules of green marketing: Strategies, tools, and inspiration for sustainable branding. Routledge.
12. Parmar, B. L., Freeman, R. E., Harrison, J. S., Wicks, A. C., Purnell, L., & De Colle, S. (2010). Stakeholder theory: The state of the art. The academy of management annals, 4(1), 403-445.
13. Patagonia. (2018). 1% for the Planet. Retrieved from https://www.patagonia.com/one-percent-for-the-planet.html
14. Stanton, W.J. & Futrell, C. (1987). Fundamentals of Marketing, 8th edition. New York: McGraw-Hill.
15. Shen, B., Wang, Y., Lo, C. K., & Shum, M. (2012). The impact of ethical fashion on consumer purchase behavior. Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management: An International Journal, 16(2), 234-245.
16. Walker, K., & Wan, F. (2012). The harm of symbolic actions and green-washing: Corporate actions and communications on environmental performance and their financial implications. Journal of business ethics, 109(2), 227-242.
17. Zellweger, T. (2017). The Dark Side of Fast Fashion-: In Search of Consumers’ Rationale Behind the Continued Consumption of Fast Fashion.

Social media has become an increasingly powerful tool over the last number of years due to rapidly evolving technology. Social media is used daily among consumers, clients, and businesses to communicate brand messages, share stories, promote products, entertain, and more. There are a number of positive and negative effects social media can have within businesses which can lead to various pros and cons as social media is such a powerful platform. The role of social media has become extremely influential over recent years as the average adult spends approximately two hours and forty minutes on social media daily, which is increasing every year (Clement, 2020). Hence, it is crucial for businesses to take full advantage of this power and use it to the best of their ability for a positive outcome. From reading various journal articles on the effects of social media in businesses it is evident that it has positive and negative effects. Businesses and firms often face internal and external pressures to adopt social media presence which can result in various outcomes (Tiago and Veríssimo 2014). Negative effects can be seen through the power of web 2.0, social media backlashes, misuse of metrics, and when viral content goes wrong which can cause risks for a business (Berthon et al. 2012). On the other hand, positive effects can be seen through the growth of companies profits and KPIs, by enhancing customer relationships (Hanna, Rohm, and Crittenden 2011), Also through the use of celebrities to influence consumers and to essentially grow a larger consumer base (Laroche, Habibi, and Richard 2013). Businesses and companies can also have a large impact on customers sharing their Corporate social responsibilities via social media (Luiten, 2020).

Social media has a large role to play within firms which can be critical to the impact of their business. These roles include providing information to consumers, connecting with stakeholders, heightening communication flow, creating hype about products, growing a larger audience base, expanding out beyond competitors, and thus generating sales. Journal article ‘Digital marketing and social media: Why bother?’ discusses how businesses and marketers must focus on relationship-based interactions with their customers in order to improve social media engagement (Tiago and Veríssimo 2014). Through the rise of social media, consumers have become increasingly dependent on one another to value peer judgements and reviews on products more so than firm promotions which is an indication of a shift in persuasive power. (Berthon et al. 2012). Social media has shifted from one-way communication of direct marketing, e-mails, television, and radio to a two-way model of communication where consumers can interact and engage with businesses via social media. According to Taneja and Toombs (2014), there are four main factors that should be taken into consideration when deciding to integrate social media into their business (Morales et. al 2017). These include determining what social media platform would best work with their business for either B2B or B2C marketing, determining the potential benefits from the use of social media, how the use of social media will differentiate them from competitors, and determining the impact of their marketing efforts. (Morales et. Al, 2017)

According to a survey conducted on marketing managers from Portugal, eighty-seven percent of respondents identified digital presence as an effective means of information exchange, stating that it established direct contact with the consumer and helps the businesses internal and external relationships. (Tiago and Veríssimo 2014). Eighty-two percent of surveyed managers also rated digital marketing extremely important to build their brand. Seventy-eight managers rated it important to improve brand knowledge and seventy percent said it was crucial for brand communication. The survey also evaluated the marketing managers’ perceptions of how best to measure social media effectiveness within a business. The conclusion showed that the best metrics to measure effectiveness is from actions that provide engagement. From page views, click-through rates, and cost per thousand impressions there are several features to collect necessary data (Tiago and Veríssimo 2014). Means to measure these metrics have dramatically advanced in the last number of years with a wide variety of tools available such as google analytics, HubSpot, Hootsuite, and more. Despite the fact social media proved to have many advantages in the survey, one manager stated that “Without clear objectives and strategy definition it is better not to use social media at all” (Tiago and Veríssimo 2014, p. 707). This shows that for social media to be fully effective the firm must use various social media platforms correctly and to their full advantage to reap the benefits which can be a difficult task.

Negative effects of social media include conflicting feedback or engagement from consumers, the pressure of constantly having to keep updated and up to speed against competitors, and errors or distasteful events within a company that can face backlash. The way in which consumers interact and share information with one another has evolved rapidly in recent years through the combined use of blogs, forums, social networking sites, and podcasts known as Web 2.0. (Berthon et al. 2012). This term originated in 2004 by the O’Reilly media web 2.0 conference where they stated the original use of the web was for consumers to retrieve information, however, now it is used to both create and consume information. This can be difficult for businesses to keep up to speed and stay engaged with consumers, especially for international marketing strategies which can face several problems worldwide. The way in which different countries and nationalities interact with social media depends on an array of factors that businesses must take into consideration for social media planning. These include the countries infrastructure and the enabling of technology and social media, the culture and shared values of the nation, and the government’s rules and regulations (Berthon et al. 2012). For example, YouTube is less popular in emerging markets where it uses a considerable amount of bandwidth and data as opposed to European countries or America where the infrastructure allows for it. Another example includes Facebook, Instagram, and many social media sites being blocked in China due to government restrictions (Berthon et al. 2012). These are important factors when it comes to social media in businesses as different regions must be targeted in various ways. These factors can also cause trouble for businesses as social media posts and events seldom remain local and can quickly cause a backlash if negative stories or posts become viral.

Social media has seen a dramatic shift in power away from the firm and towards consumers and communities. When we think of social media content that has gone viral often comical, entertaining, and interesting images come to mind. However, this is not always the case and companies can often find themselves in difficulty when a negative post, story, or video goes viral which can impact their business. For example, ‘United Breaks Guitars’ quickly became a viral backlash for United in 2009. Passenger Dave Carroll flew with United to discover his guitar was broken upon arrival at his destination. After a year of trying to claim for damages and to no avail Carroll informed the airline he would be writing a song about his experience. After the video was uploaded on YouTube and Twitter it quickly started trending, being shared and aired on T.V channels such as CNN. When the story was published in The Times London, United Airlines’ market capitalization declined by twenty percent which was a significant one hundred and eight-million-dollar loss in value to shareholders. This was a huge downfall and backlash against United and it shows the impact of social media, how quickly it spreads to international markets.

Marketers need to listen and learn, take the right tone and actions when engaging with consumers (Berthon et al. 2012). Consumers build up trust and bonds with products and companies through loyalty and communities and feel betrayed when businesses have faulty products, services, or cover-ups. Another example of a social media backlash in a company was when Apple admitted they slowed down older iPhones in order to get consumers to either upgrade to a newer iPhone version or replace their battery. Apple explained to consumers that the older the battery gets it becomes harder to supply the maximum current needed for the iPhone’s processor at full speed.

Executive Summary:

The purpose of this project is to understand Entrepreneur and their marketing strategies. The entrepreneur that I selected is Walt Disney. Walter Elias Disney was an American entrepreneur, animator, voice actor, and film producer. A pioneer of the American animation industry, he introduced several developments in the production of cartoons. The project consists of Walt Disney the marketing strategies and growth strategies. The project helped us gain in-depth knowledge of how marketing concepts can be used to analyze and judge the growth as well as the working prospects of a company and its strategies.

His unconventional approach has helped the company generate profit constantly. Throughout the course of this project, a thorough analysis of the company was done. The tools used for the analysis were

• Disney’s Creative Strategy: The Dreamer, The Realist and The Critic
• Disney’s Generic Competitive Strategy & Intensive Growth Strategies
• The Walt Disney Company’s Generic Strategy for Competitive Advantage (Porter’s Model)
• The Walt Disney Company’s Intensive Strategies for Growth

About Walt Disney:

Walter Elias Disney (December 5, 1901 – December 15, 1966) became an American enterprise entrepreneur, artist, voice entertainer and filmmaker. A pioneer of the American motion enterprise, he supplied a few improvements in the introduction of kids indicates. As a moviemaker, Disney holds the record for most Academy Awards earned by way of a person, having won 22 Oscars from fifty-nine assignments. He becomes given two Golden Globe unique fulfillment Awards and an Emmy Award, among different distinctions. Some of his films are integrated into the countrywide film Registry by way of the Library of Congress.

Born in Chicago in 1901, Disney built up an early enthusiasm for illustration. He took craftsmanship lessons as a kid and determined a brand new line of work as a business artist at 18 years antique. He moved to California in the mid-Twenties and installed the Disney Brothers Studio with his sibling Roy. With Ub Iwerks, Walt built up the person Mickey Mouse in 1928, his first fantastically widely recognized success; he likewise gave a voice to his creation within the early years. as the studio evolved, Disney grew to become out to be step by step daring, imparting synchronized sound, complete-shading three-strip Technicolor, complete length children’s suggests and specialized upgrades in cameras. The results, located in highlights, as an instance, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Pinocchio, Fantasia (1940), Dumbo (1941), and Bambi (1942), superior the development of the vivified movie. New energized and actual lifestyles films trailed international warfare II, consisting of the basically fruitful Cinderella (1950) and Mary Poppins (1964), the final of which were given five Academy Awards.

In the course of the Fifties, Disney increased into the entertainment park enterprise, and in 1955 he opened Disneyland. To subsidize the assignment he was more desirable into television programs, for an instance, Walt Disney’s Disneyland and The Mickey Mouse Club; he was additionally engaged with arranging the 1959 Moscow honest, the 1960 iciness Olympics, and the 1964 NY global fair. In 1965, he began the development of another amusement park, Disney global, the middle of which turned into to be any other kind of city, the ‘Exploratory Prototype network of the next day (EPCOT). Disney become a big smoker for a super period and gave up the ghost of lung malignant increase in December 1966 preceding both the undertaking center or the EPCOT challenge had been finished.

Disney was a shy, self-deprecating and insecure man in person but followed a heat and outgoing public persona. He had excessive requirements and high expectations of those with whom he labored. Although there were accusations that he became racist or anti-Semitic, they were contradicted by means of many who knew him. His recognition changed in the years after his loss of life, from a purveyor of homely patriotic values to a consultant of Yankee imperialism. He although stays a vital discern in the history of animation and in the cultural records of the USA, in which he’s considered a countrywide cultural icon. His movie paintings remain proven and adapted; his namesake studio and enterprise continue to excessive standards in its manufacturing of famous enjoyment, and the Disney entertainment parks have grown in size and variety to draw traffic in numerous countries.

Strategies of Walt Disney:

Disney’s Creative Strategy: The Dreamer, The Realist, and The Critic:

Recently, we introduced a number of methods and tools to fuel innovation and creativity inside organizations through innovative questioning and brainstorming, as an example, Lego Serious Play, De Bono Six questioning Hats, and Reversed Brainstorming. Disney’s innovative strategy is any other apparatus for resourceful reasoning and turned into roused through Walt Disney.

He became successful in finding inventive thoughts and changing over them into the real world. In mild of a close-by accomplice, he used to the country ‘There were absolutely three different Walts: the visionary, the pragmatist, and the spoiler. You never knew which one became going to the gathering.’

Walt Disney’s method became featured and confirmed later in 1994 by using NLP grasp Robert Dilts. He characterized the strategy as Disney’s technique for transforming his myth into the actual global. On this approach, the gathering of people makes use of a specific reasoning circulation that fabricates parallel reasoning that may be applied to create, examine, investigate the mind, and address problems.

Even though the technique becomes now not fully advanced by Walt Disney, it bridges the gap between creativity and truth. The creative method unlocks the thoughts’ capabilities to dream and shape unexpected ideas and answers for current problems. But, those answers may not be relevant in reality and may not be able to be implemented as a strategic plan. Therefore, one if the advantages of Disney’s creative strategy method are balancing both dream and reality as a way to build a feasible layout.

Preparing for Disney’s Creative Strategy:

In order to prepare the team for Disney’s creative strategy; four parts of the room are set for each questioning method. The primary part is for dreaming and imagination, the second component is for realists and/or making plans, the third component is for critics and the fourth component is for purchasing the thoughts outside the thinking flow.

The idea of putting a wondering location for every level within the method is to put together the team thoughts to exchange thinking modes from one to some other. The region can be a room, an open space workplace or an outdoor garden.

The team gathers with a goal to acquire, this target may be a dream to show into fact, a layout to visualize, a hassle to clear up or a technique to improve. But, the history of Disney’s method qualifies it to fit with innovative brainstorming to assist flip dreams into relevant projects.

The strategy is based on three main stages; the dreamer, the realist, and the critic. Each stage represents a style of thinking and it should be applied in the same sequence as below:

The dreamer:

Usually, any innovative idea starts off evolving with a dream complete of passion and exuberance. In normal meetings, this dreaming fashion is halted with the aid of truth and does no longer have the space to head similarly on. Mentioned in the information. In this Disney innovative method, the primary stage allows the group to proportion their dream without no restrictions or grievances. This helps to construct a pool of creative ideas. Some of these thoughts are feasible and others aren’t. Figuring out viable innovative concepts comes later because of the second and third thinking styles.

The realist:

Now, finally, follows the realist style. The institution switches the spot and mode to assume in a gradually sensible arranging fashion. In view of the number one stage, the contributors imagine that the delusion is viable and begin setting intends to accomplish it. The planned way to convert the nonexistent mind into a realistic pastime plan. To this degree, every one of the issues have to be valuable and goal reworking the thought right into a real plan.

The Critic:

After having a plan to turn the concept into reality, the critic-questioning tends to find out the limitations of making use of the idea and how to conquer it. In this consultation, the team presents a positive critique for the idea on the way to locate the susceptible points and clear up it the very last solution.

Disney’s Generic Competitive Strategy & Intensive Growth Strategies

This business analysis reflects strategic management efforts. The company’s generic strategy focuses on developing competitive advantages based on innovation in product development. Disney’s intensive strategies are implemented with strategic objectives for maximizing the growth benefits of such innovation. For example, the company grows by introducing technologically enhanced products, such as movies for customers in the international market. In the context of Michael Porter’s model, The Walt Disney Company’s generic competitive strategy and intensive growth strategies are aligned for product-focused development.

The Walt Disney Company’s Generic Strategy for Competitive Advantage (Porter’s Model)

Disney makes use of product differentiation as its conventional method for aggressive benefit. Michael Porter’s version states that this method includes precise merchandise furnished to many market segments. As instance, the industrial organization employer offers its entertainment merchandise to almost anyone in worldwide, mainly with a middle emphasis on family-oriented programming. In this frequent aggressive approach, first-rate and forte via innovation differentiate the commercial enterprise company’s products from the opposition. The subsidiary Walt Disney Imagineering research & improvement, Inc. has devoted organizations to ensure the uniqueness of amusement reviews inside the enterprise’s subject count number of parks and hotels. The business enterprise’s widespread growth strategies and associated strategic objectives are carried out along this typical method, with emphasis on differentiated aggressive benefits to useful resources and managing employer growth.

The Walt Disney organization employer’s popular aggressive method pushes for product-centered strategic desires. Such business employer recognition is important for supporting product improvement efforts to distinguish the organization from the competition. For instance, the strategic aim of growing new augmented truth merchandise provides to the uniqueness of Disney revel in. based totally on this significant approach, a few different applicable strategic purpose is to enhance competitive advantages thru advertising techniques that red meat up the individuality of the business company’s emblem. Those advertising and marketing techniques are a part of Disney’s marketing and marketing advertising and marketing blend or 4Ps. moreover, associated managerial efforts make contributions to the success of Disney’s organization

assignment and imaginative and prescient statements within the worldwide marketplace for entertainment, mass media, and subject-depend park merchandise. Brand region of know-how permits in carrying out business enterprise manipulation. Considering the differentiation normal competitive approach in Porter’s version, substantial techniques must include differentiation to increase the commercial enterprise.

The Walt Disney Company’s Intensive Strategies for Growth

Product Development (Primary):

Product Development is The Walt Disney business enterprise’s number one in-depth increase approach. This strategy entails imparting new products in the enterprise’s modern or existing markets. As an example, the agency releases new films with corresponding products to generate greater profits from its target customers internationally. This employer evaluation additionally sheds mild on the importance of Disney’s organizational shape, which gives the organizational layout to effectively manipulate product development. This in-depth method hyperlinks to the differentiation regular aggressive strategy in emphasizing specialty in product improvement. An associated strategic objective is to obtain business increase through correctly persuading customers to buy Disney’s merchandise on the idea of their particular attributes, together with in leisure experience.

Market Penetration (Secondary):

The Walt Disney Corporation achieves a boom partly thru market penetration. As a secondary intensive approach, marketplace penetration lets in increase thru developing income of existing products in the enterprise’s contemporary markets. For instance, one of the company’s strategic desires is to use aggressive advertising and marketing to increase its revenues from merchandise released inside the international enjoyment corporation. The enterprise strengths tested in the SWOT assessment of Disney contribute to fulfillment in implementing this in-depth increase method. A strong brand based on the differentiation common approach creates a competitive advantage to draw clients to the enterprise’s products and to govern customers’ expectations.

Market Development:

Market development is an extensive increase strategy that is less frequently used inside the Walt Disney employer’s enterprise. In developing the business, this extensive method requires the business enterprise to introduce its existing merchandise to new markets or marketplace segments. As an example, the boom is performed through setting up operations in new markets, which includes a brand new Disneyland enjoyment park to capture a regional marketplace. Regardless of aggressive demanding situations, access into new markets can grow the enterprise’s strengths to manage the industry’s competitive forces shown in Porter’s five Forces analysis of Disney. A key strategic objective in market development is to apply the differentiation generic aggressive strategy to correctly introduce the enterprise’s merchandise into new markets.

Diversification:

The Walt Disney enterprise makes use of diversification as an assisting extensive approach for business increase. Developing or obtaining new organizations is the standard method on this intensive increase approach. For example, thru the status quo of the Disney Cruise Line, the corporation grew by means of coming into the cruise line marketplace of the tourism and hospitality industries. The differentiation prevalent strategy develops the competitive gain of recent enterprise operations that use the business enterprise’s logo. Beneath diversification, a strategic objective is to control aggressive challenges via growing new companies that grow the employer’s presence and logo recognition in the worldwide market.

How it inspires students to become entrepreneurs?

The way Walt Disney encourages me to grow to be an entrepreneur is within the fashion industry. Being a student who has a passion for fashion it inspires me to apply and broaden Walt Disney. Being in the style enterprise creativity in fashion and design is precipitated by means of the need to grow quality, the need to increase the price for cash, achievement of brand identification and individuality. As an end result, most style designers have portrayed their pastimes in wondering about new layout ideas. Now that we’ve got hooked up on how important creativity is to business success, ways to get your employees engaged in extra innovative questioning and thoughts. With a place of attention in each marketing and style vending. Importance of Creativity in commercial enterprise Innovative commercial enterprise thoughts set organizations other from one another.

Creativity is critical for companies nowadays, specifically whilst the marketplace is depending on a progressive, breaking era. The collaboration of creative minds has the potential to push creative enterprise ideas into truth. Creative thinking increases productiveness. Other than a strong concept, one of the maximum important components of a business is increased productiveness. It is had to ensure that demands are met and that clients are glad. Specific advantages of creativity inside the place of work include: … leads to boredom, however too much challenge ends in emotions of being beaten. Stable goals are also crucial due to the fact it’s miles hard to paint creatively toward a transferring goal. One of the vital matters that an enterprise needs to be successful is creative thinking. Creativity in fashion and design is triggered by the need to increase quality, the need to increase value for money, achievement of brand identity and individuality. As a result, most fashion designers have portrayed their interests in thinking of new design ideas each business must be able to compete with their competition and preserve up with today’s tendencies within the industry. They ought to make some decisions to ensure that the productivity of the enterprise increases. “The Importance of Creativity in Business. Organizations today operate in a highly competitive, global environment, making creativity crucial. Creativity is what fuels big ideas, challenges employees’ way of thinking, and opens the door to new business opportunities. You can have great ideas, but not be innovative.”

Conclusion:

As a result of the three main stages above in Disney’s creative strategy, the team reaches a stable innovative concept with a motion plan to use it. The first stage focuses on the creative aspect and sharing creative ideas and solutions. The second stage focuses on truth and how to show the idea into an action plan and finally, the third stage aims to identify the weakness in the idea and overcome it in the final plan.

Walt Disney Company is an enterprise that is a model for other businesses. they’ve many enterprise gadgets that have the capacity to generate huge quantities of revenue. With an envisioned Internet worth of over $85 billion dollars, Walt Disney has different its hobbies to always provide earnings to the commercial enterprise. If Disney can place a few recognition at the threats and weaknesses they face, it’ll supply them greater opportunities to extend into an even greater explosive company. The growth into growing countries will permit them to truly develop and expose countries to their many ventures to experience the happiest area on the planet. “Disneyland, Walt Disney and their characters have given a lot of happiness inside the previous few decades that people have forgotten that they’re also a profit-making enterprise.” (Bhasin, 2016) The inner analysis is, in reality, one this is first-rate because in each ounce of study shows their strengths and opportunities out weight their threats and weaknesses. Walt Disney is a strategic enterprise and is a version to businesses striving to acquire greatness as they make they’re proper their higher and they’re better at their best. Disney is an extremely aggressive business that offers excessive levels amusing and entertainment for all and sundry is willing to visit or put money into their merchandise. They’ll remain a first-rate dealer of joy, and this may permit them to continually provide enjoyment in contrast to every other.

While other creative thinking methods such as Six Thinking Hats do not restrict a specific sequence for the steps, Disney’s Creative Strategy needs to follow the steps as stated above.

References:

1. Elmansy, R. (2016, April 07). Disney’s Creative Strategy: The Dreamer, The Realist and The Critic. Retrieved May 29, 2019, from https://www.designorate.com/disneys-creative-strategy/
2. How Creativity is Quickly Shaping Modern Fashion. (n.d.). Retrieved June 9, 2019, from http://www.delphineballey.com/2017/09/06/how-creativity-is-quickly-shaping-modern-fashion
3. Kyanadishone1. (n.d.). Conclusion Walt Disney Company is a business that is a model for others. Retrieved June 9, 2019, from https://www.coursehero.com/file/p4c37qd/Conclusion-Walt-Disney-Company-is-a-business-that-is-a-model-for-other/
4. Walt Disney. (2019, April 28). Retrieved June 9, 2019, from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney
5. Williams, A. (2019, March 06). Disney’s Generic Competitive Strategy & Intensive Growth Strategies. Retrieved June 9, 2019, from http://panmore.com/disney-generic-competitive-strategy-intensive-growth-strategie

Executive Summary

This report was written to show what is Samsung’s marketing strategy and how do they promote their phones using different marketing mixes. This report draws attention to the fact that Samsung is leading the market share against Apple and other brands in the last year at 26.15%. Thus, the report shows how Samsung stays at the top while knowing its positioning in the market. Samsung also have specific target customers, so it can focus its products to be more eye-catching to the customers. Thus, they have profiled their target customers and foresee those potential customers in the future. It also shows marketing mix considerations that Samsung takes to promote their products and how are the products promoted such as through advertisement, billboards and social media. Additionally, Samsung also faced some social and ethical issues as they promote their smartphones such as environmental, health and safety issues. Lastly, the report also shows an example of a marketing plan for the product chosen.

1. Introduction

Samsung is one of the world’s largest producers of electronic devices. It has become one of the most recognizable names in technology. First released in July 2009, the first Samsung Galaxy really put Samsung at the forefront of people’s minds when it came to Android. Samsung has been dominating and price ranges of the Android market from the Galaxy S series of phones. In the first quarter of 2012, Samsung became the world’s largest mobile phone maker by unit sales. Currently, Samsung has launched many different Samsung Galaxy Series, which have been very well-known in the market. Samsung Galaxy smartphone series not only became the company’s most admired product but also often topped lists of the best-selling smartphones in the world annually.

1.1. Product Description

• Samsung Galaxy S9

Samsung Galaxy S9 comes with a 5.8 inches LCD screen, Android 8.0, and Octa-core. It is dual sim compatible and allows a microSD card. It has an internal memory of up to 256GB with a 4GB ram. The back camera is 12 megapixels while the front camera is 8 megapixels. The phone comes with a fingerprint scanner, facial recognition, and iris scanner as different features to unlock the phone. The battery is a Li-Ion 3000mAh battery that allows wireless charging.

1.2. Projected Sales Revenue

Samsung’s difficulties in the mobile market have been worsened by its lack of innovation to improve the sales of its premium Galaxy series smartphones. The mobile business billed 2.7 trillion won ($3.25billion SGD) in quarterly operating profit. There is a drop of 34 percent from the previous quarter.

1.3. Potential Market Share

Mobile Vendor Market Share Singapore from Jan 2018- Jan 2019

Samsung has had a little over one-fourth of the mobile market share in Singapore in the last year. Compared to their competitors Apple and Xiaomi, that has only 13-14% of the market share. This shows that Samsung has double the market share of its competitors.

2. Key Marketing Concepts & Principles

2.1. Positioning in the market

Samsung delivers cheap and innovative products without an emphasis on design. This is an important factor where Apple’s success won Samsung. It was the design on its iPhone. Now Samsung puts more focus on design so that they are able to compete with Apple in a more effective way.

• Oppo
• Xiaomi
• Samsung
• Apple
• Perceptual Mapping for Samsung and Competitors

2.2. Types of Segmentation

Samsung’s geographical segmentation targets 80 Countries Worldwide. While their demographic segmentation targets both males and females from the age of 18 to 65. Most of the consumers are probably students and working adults. Samsung’s behavioral segmentation targets consumers based on what benefits they are searching for such as excellent quality and beautiful design. While their psychographic segmentation targets middle- and upper-class people, based on their lifestyle and personality.

2.3. Profile of target market

Samsung mobile targets a huge range of consumers. The target age of customers ranged from the early 20s to the 60s. Thus, if a person can afford to buy and use the product, Samsung has products for them.

Teenagers to young adults aged 18 to late 20s. This age group of customers is Samsung’s mobile main target customers as they are mostly technology savvy. This group of customers is increasing as Samsung foresees that this group has better spending power in the future.

Adults were aged 30 to 65 and above. This specific group of targets, the biggest portion of Samsung’s target market. This group of consumers has the most capability to purchase any of Samsung’s products in the market. This group of customers will continue to increase in future years.

3. Marketing Mix Considerations

3.1. Product

Samsung Galaxy series are among the most innovative presently out there in the market. The whole series consists of various models, and most of them acquired more fame than expected. S9 and S9+ are two well-known models whose main feature is the innovative camera that acquired its admiration from famous media brands. Samsung has included extra features to make the phone more attractive such as exclusive rewards for using Samsung pay. Data security has become a huge problem. Thus, Knox-like features are important for smartphones to ensure that your data is kept safe and confidential. Additionally, the S9 and S9+ come with facial recognition features. Samsung has always done its best in providing its users with an immersive experience.

3.2. Place

Samsung products are sold in the market through different channels such as sales and service dealers, local retailers, and distributors. Samsung retailers sell products through multiple third-party dealers concentrating on the demand and opportunities. In Singapore, there are many retailers and distributors selling Samsung products. Some such as Singtel, Starhub, and M1. Samsung also has its own stores in Singapore to cater to sales and service. However, a huge part of sales now takes place online. Galaxy phones and accessories are also available at other e-retailers like Lazada and Zalora.

3.3. Price

Samsung has different pricing methods. Some limited-edition products, which are only found in certain countries, are generally more expensive to meet the demands and use skimming prices. Samsung uses the skimming price technique, whereby they get a high price for their own product before their competitors enter the market. However, if the product becomes old or overtaken by others, Samsung decreases its price. In some cases, Samsung also uses competitive pricing schemes to be able to surpass the competitors in the market.

3.4. Promotion

Digital channels are the primary promotions of Galaxy S9 such as social media, technology blogs, and paid advertising. The phone has earned great levels of coverage in media owing to attractions like its impressive camera and facial recognition features. Tech blogs have reviews and more information on its specifications and pricing. E-retail brands that sell Galaxy smartphones played a huge role in the promotion of the S9. Famed celebrities are made as its brand ambassador to support the promotion of their smartphones and their brand. Samsung’s strategy is to use part of its revenue produced from sales to use for promoting its product.

4. Socially Responsible and Ethical Issues

4.1. Ethics

Health and safety risk poses a threat to consumers as the phone may emit strong radiation. For example, Samsung released the Galaxy S7 in 2016, which exploded due to battery problems. The cause of the explosion was Samsung’s failure to check the safety of the phone due to the rush for the release date. Many consumers were victims of the situation, and Samsung was unable to recall the phone in time. Due to this many consumers lost trust in Samsung. Therefore, Samsung compensated consumers with refunds or another model of Samsung phone.

Environmental problems are caused by producing smartphones. The impact of smartphones on human lives isn’t as simple as it is. Once they are spoilt, thrown away or recycled, smartphones will find themselves in e-waste dumps in China and low-income countries. Only 10% of the smartphone is recycled, workers would salvage valuable materials and metals. The rest of the parts are then tossed into the e-waste dumps. Workers will burn the e-waste causing pollutants into the surrounding environment and to workers themselves.

4.2. Social

Privacy can be another issue of ethics in society. Most of the world currently carries a smartphone with them everywhere. Thus, smartphones are a way for people to keep data that are confidential for easy access. This can be a huge problem as hackers can easily invade one’s data and gather information quickly. Thus, many companies, for example, Samsung is trying to improve the security in their smartphone to prevent the invasion of privacy and stealing of data.

Smartphone overuse is a problem to the current society as people are consuming most of their time on their smartphones to an extent that it affects their life negatively. Smartphone addiction is a form where people cannot stay away from their phones and many issues arise from this addiction. Due to the extensive impact on our everyday life, people become unaware of their surroundings and unable to communicate face to face properly. The overuse of smartphones caused society to have more physical problems such as neck pains and bad eyesight. This caused society to also have a weaker interpersonal relationships with others.

5. Information Communication Technologies

5.1. Place – Social Media

Samsung Mobile is solely used for promoting of Samsung smartphones on Twitter. It updates news related to upcoming Galaxy models regularly. Besides Twitter, other social media websites are used to promote its products and engage its customers. YouTube is the most reliable website for video promotion. They have a larger and wider audience. Samsung has made many magnificent videos to advertise its Galaxy smartphones. In this way, Samsung has used many different channels including social media to promote its Galaxy S9 and S9+.

5.2. Promotion – Digital Marketing

Samsung relies a lot on digital technology for the marketing of its products. Firstly, Samsung promotes its Galaxy smartphone through its website. Furthermore, Samsung uses many types of media to promote its smartphones. S9 was also promoted through events so that the product could be exposed to the public swiftly. A huge population of people can be found online as smartphones are designed to help us stay connected. Thus, this allows people to know about Samsung’s new product rapidly. Samsung adopts digital marketing techniques that include paid commercials, video marketing, brand website, and social media. However, once their product has been known in the market, it is easy to reach out to potential customers as Google will do the rest of the job. Any search for Samsung Galaxy S9 results from Lazada and other e-retailers will be shown at the top and websites including Samsung’s own website.

6. Marketing Plan

The objective and goal of Samsung is to generate sales profit from promoting and selling of the Samsung Galaxy S9. Thus, they must find a way to be able to win the competition against Apple and other brands. Therefore, Samsung will have to promote the innovative features of the Samsung Galaxy S9 which is the camera and the facial recognition feature.

The strengths of Samsung are that they are innovative, great with design, low-cost production, and a large market share. The weaknesses of Samsung are that they have very strong competitors, low-profit margins and products may not always be user-friendly. The opportunities for Samsung are they can improve in the quality of their products and take advantage of the raising smartphone market. Some threats that Samsung are facing are more competition in the market with new brands, a slow market for developed countries and a rapid change in technology. Samsung will plan to promote its new Samsung Galaxy S9 through every type of social media. As currently, almost everyone is always connected to the internet. Samsung will implement things such as pre-ordering of the phone and promotions to get regular customers to upgrade or buy the phone. Such as pre-ordering the Samsung Galaxy S9 will be given a free Samsung wireless charging pad and free screen protector. This will boost the sales of the phone as it sounds like a good deal for customers. Some resources that Samsung needs to promote the Samsung Galaxy S9 is that they need material such as advertisements, social media, and retailers to get the word out to the public. They also can run events to further promote to the public through the physical product itself. All the events require manpower thus they need to hire people to help support their promotion.

7. Reference

1. Specifications | Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9 | Samsung Singapore. (2018, June 21). Retrieved from https://www.samsung.com/sg/smartphones/galaxy-s9/specs
2. Bhasin, H., Prateek, Bhasin, H., Modi, A., & Bhasin, H. (2018, January 09). Marketing mix of Samsung galaxy, Samsung galaxy marketing mix. Retrieved from https://www.marketing91.com/marketing-mix-samsung-galaxy/
3. Telecomlead. (2018, July 31). Samsung revenue dips 4% to $52.28 bn as Galaxy S9 sales drop. Retrieved from https://www.telecomlead.com/smart-phone/samsung-revenue-dips-4-to-52-28-bn-as-phone-sales-drop-85603
4. Mobile Vendor Market Share Singapore. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-market-share/mobile/singapore/#monthly-201801-201901-bar
5. Bondarenko, P. (2018, October 24). Samsung. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/topic/Samsung-Electronics
6. Pratap, A. (2018, November 15). Marketing Mix and Marketing Strategy of Samsung Galaxy S9. Retrieved from https://www.cheshnotes.com/2018/07/marketing-mix-and-marketing-strategy-of-samsung-galaxy-s9/
7. Samsung Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning: Multi-segment, imitative and anticipatory. (2017, October 12). Retrieved from https://research-methodology.net/samsung-segmentation-targeting-positioning-multi-segment-imitative-anticipatory/
8. Davis, M. (2018, October 05). To make a smartphone, lose your ethics. Retrieved from https://bigthink.com/matt-davis/to-make-a-smartphone-lose-your-ethics
9. Smartphone Overuse – A Growing Public Health Issue. (2017, February 28). Retrieved from https://www.omicsonline.org/open-access/smartphone-overuse–a-growing-public-health-issue-2161-0487-1000289.php?aid=86257
10. Singh, S. (2017, November 09). Is Samsung an Ethical Company? Retrieved from https://soapboxie.com/social-issues/Is-Samsung-An-Ethical-Company
11. A brief history of Samsung phones – the past, present and future. (2019, February 15). Retrieved from http://www.three.co.uk/hub/brief-history-samsung-phones/

Marketing Strategy

Entrepreneurship

“Walter Elias Disney was an American entrepreneur, animator, voice actor and film producer. A pioneer of the American animation industry, he introduced several developments in the production of cartoons.” Walt Disney started in 1923 in the back of a small office occupied by Holly-Vermont Realty in Los Angeles. That is where Walt Disney and his brother Roy, produced a series of short live-action/animated films collectively called the Alice Comedies. In 1937 Disney’s innovative first full-length animated would feature the now well-known Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. “In order to expand and meet the expectations of his audience which later led him to expand his studios to over 51 acres of land in Burbank. The American Multinational is the leader in not just the American entertainment industry but other countries as well. Walt Disney offers a diversified group of services that include live-action, theme parks, and television. Walt Disney currently operates in four business segments which include large mass income per segment, Consumer Products & Interactive Media with an income of $1.97 billion, Studio Entertainment with an income of $2.70 Billion, Parks and Resorts with an income of $3.29 billion, and Media Network being the highest with an income of $7.75 billion.

Strategic Reorganization of Walt Disney

In March 2018, Walt Disney introduced their Strategic Reorganization of Walt Disney. “New Structure Consolidates the Company’s Direct-to-Consumer Services, Technology and International Media Operations into a Single, Worldwide Business to Capitalize on Growth Opportunities” Kevin Mayer named Chairman of the Direct-to-Consumer and International Segment. Bob Chapek was named Chairman of the Parks, Experiences, and Consumer Products Segment. Some of the executive leaders who bring tremendous experience, visionary thinking and a shared commitment to excellence, creativity, and innovation to the day-to-day operation of Walt Disney include Robert A. Iger (Chairman and Chief Executive Officer), Alan Bergman (Co-Chairman, of The Walt Disney Studios), Alan Braverman (Senior Executive Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary).

Primary segments

One of the primary segments of Walt Disney is children who are targeted especially through their animated cartoons, merchandise, and theme parks. However, Disney has such an influence on many lives that even adults become the target to their segments. Walt Disney offers services that are meant for all different age groups and that would allow Disney to use a differentiated target strategy to serve their large customer base. With Walt Disney being the second largest media company with such a high value it harvests a high share of heart and share of wallet in the industry.

Advertising and promotion

Walt Disney has a wide range of advertising and promotions. “Disney’s ownership of media networks such as ABC, Disney Channel, and ESPN is a strategy the company is using to market its brand to Americans. This includes a systematic approach to television advertising, as well as radio commercials, print, outdoor advertising, and mobile initiatives, promoting discounts on resorts, and family packages.” To reach an older group such as teenagers, Disney Land came up with the idea to launch advergaming, which puts ad messages in online and video games. Disney’s goal was to reach kids and teens directly and encourage them to urge their parents to visit a Disney park for the ultimate family experience.

SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats)

Strengths in the SWOT Analysis of Walt Disney would include their characters Disney reached their highest peak because of the characters that everyone adores. Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Goofy, Donald Duck, Ariel, Cinderella, and Snow White just to name a few are the main revenue generators for Walt Disney. Walt Disney wouldn’t be who they are today if it weren’t for these characters and many other characters.

Some of the Weaknesses in the SWOT of Walt Disney would be that the “company is missing out on the online market as all its presence is offline-Today’s children prefer staying online than going out in the real world. Of course, that’s harmful but that’s how it is, right?” Since children today prefer to be online, Warner Brothers decided to launch Pottermore, which is an online Harry Potter World. Being that there are many online games that are present today it is hard for Walt Disney to compete in that area which becomes a weakness for them.

Some of Walt Disney’s opportunity advantages would be they could develop in other countries such as India, Brazil, and Argentina. With Disney moving into countries such as these it would not only allow these countries to enjoy the kingdom of Walt Disney, but it would also raise much revenue for not only Walt Disney, but for the country itself.

Many cartoons right now are considered threats right now for Walt Disney, such as Cars, and Monsters, Inc both are Pixar cartoons and many of Pixar and other competitors are currently drawing large groups towards them in the film sector of it. Another threat that Walt Disney faces are all the video games that children, teens and even adults indulge in such as Madden, Fortnite, and Apex Legends. These are all threats to Walt Disney, but with proper planning, and the introduction of new items such as video games Disney wouldn’t be faced with these threats. Bootleg movies are another threat that Walt Disney is faced and they are starting to crack down on people who are selling bootleg copies of their cartoons, and movies. Disney has also cracked down on ticket holders who purchase souvenirs in the theme parks and resell them online through eBay and other online sites to make a few extra bucks. “The Orange County Register reports that Disneyland is quietly revoking annual passes of guests who buy and resell souvenirs.” By Walt Disney cracking down on people reselling their merchandise they are able to get control over this and eventually it won’t be such a threat to them.

Economic Factors

Economic Factors that Impact The Walt Disney Company would be the Macro environment such as inflation rate, savings rate; interest rate, foreign exchange rate, and economic cycle determine the aggregate demand and aggregate investment in an economy. While micro environment factors such as competition norms impact the competitive advantage of the firm. The Walt Disney Company can use the country’s economic factors such as growth rate, and inflation, and the industry’s economic indicators such as the Entertainment-Diversified industry growth rate, consumer spending, etc. to forecast the growth trajectory.

Globalization

While operating not only in America but overseas Walt Disney faces many global challenges of Global Strategy for media companies. In June Walt Disney opened its doors to consumers that are every bit as engaged in the Disney brand as their western counterparts. Disney had decided to invest significantly in China, considering that the price tag for the latest theme park was more than $4.05 billion dollars more than Disney paid for Lucas Films which is the owner of the Star Wars Brand. “In 2012 Disney spends $4.24 billion dollars to purchase Marvel Entertainment. Even though Disney’s Parks and Resorts segment of Disney’s generates over twice as much as its Walt Disney Studios segment it still helps to underline the costs involved for the conglomerate in building the world’s most expensive theme park to date.”

In conclusion, Walt Disney built a huge empire that is a model for other businesses. They have many business units that could generate large amounts of revenue. With an estimate worth over 85 billion dollars. Walt Disney has diversified its interests to continually provide profit to the business. If Disney can place some focus on the threats and weaknesses they face, it will give them more opportunities to expand into an even larger company. The expansion of possibly developing into other countries will also allow them to really grow and expose countries to their many ventures to experience the happiest place on earth. “Disneyland, Walt Disney, and their characters have given so much happiness in the last few decades that people have forgotten that they are also a profit-making organization.” Walt Disney is a strategic business and is a model to businesses striving to attain greatness. Walt Disney Company is an extremely competitive business that offers high-level fun and enjoyment for anyone that is willing to visit or invest in their products. They will continue to be a major supplier of joy, and this will allow them to continually provide an experience unlike no other.

Introduction

Background

Recently, the pet industry in Korea has grown greatly. According to the nonghyup economic research laboratory (2019), the market size, which stood at 1.8 tillion won in 2012, has grown rapidly to 2.89 trillion won in 2018 and is expected to grow to 5.8 trillion won in 2020 (The domestic pet market is worth 3 trillion won. Get the peddlers, get the petfam! 2019). As the pet market grew, there were even new words ‘Petfam’ (pet+family) and ‘Petconomy’(pet+economy) which is reflecting the growth of the companion animal market. With the continued growth of ‘petfam’ which reach 10 million and ‘petconomy’, interest in the pet food industry, a part of the pet industry, has risen (The age of 10 million pets ‘Evolving petcony’ 2019). However, according to the Korea Customs Service’s Export-Import Trade Statistics (2019), imports of dog and cat food amounted to $148 million in 2015, increasing 13.8 to 22.5 percent from a year earlier between 2016 and 2018. The trade deficit also expanded 18.5 percent annually until 2018 from $135 million in 2015 (280 billion won in imports and 17 billion won in exports…Pet Products Foreigner’s Owner’s 2019). In other words, most of the pet food in the pet market in Korea is imported brands. According to KB Economic & Finance Institute, the combined sales of 26 local pet food companies account for only 20 percent of the pet food market, while 50 to 60 percent of the pet food market is income (280 billion won in imports and 17 billion won in exports…Pet Products Foreigner’s Owner’s 2019).

Through this Korea’s current situation, I want to examine why Korea should import more than half of Korea’s pet food market and why they don’t use domestic brands, and the reason of this problem is a consumer perception problem for Korean domestic brands, or whether it’s a Korean domestic brand’s marketing strategy problem. Therefore, this study will investigate the current status of Korea pet food industry, and identify problems in Korean domestic pet food, present marketing strategies for growth of Korean domestic brands that fall behind foreign brands, and study consumers’ perception about Korean domestic pet food brand and consumers’ consumption status in order to develop their marketing strategies.

Problem definition

Recently in Korea, the spread of negative perceptions of marriage and low birth rates have caused an increase in the number of one to two-person households, along with an increase in demand for pets. In 2015, among the households that owned pets in Korea, about 27 percent were thirties single-person households, and 30 percent were first-generation households consisting of two-person households (agencyAnimal 2015). And the proportion of first-generation households consisting of only one-person and two-person households in Korea increased from about 27.9 percent in 2000 to 46.1 percent in 2019 and is estimated to reach about 50 percent in 2025 (Special Estimation of Future household 2019).

Therefore, the demand for pet-owned households and pets in Korea is expected to continue to grow in the future. With the rise of pet-owned households and the rise of living standards and overall income, the number of people who do not spare money on pets has increased, and the pet industry has also grown significantly.

Statement of Problem

Although the pet food business is growing in Korea, most consumers still use foreign pet food brand products, not domestic brands. Currently, since domestic and foreign brands of pet food have different marketing strategies, this is creating different consumer perceptions for each brand in the pet food market in Korea, which is showing different result.

Thesis objectives

• To study the comparison marketing strategy which used by Korean domestic brand, and foreign brand
• To investigate the consumer perception with comparing between Korean domestic brand and foreign brand

Research questions

• What is the perception of Korean consumer about Korean pet food brand?
• What is the perception of Korean consumer about foreign pet food brand?
• What is the marketing strategy of the domestic pet food brand in Korea?
• What is the marketing strategy of the foreign pet food brand in Korea?
• What is the marketing strategy for domestic brand to get a better perception than foreign brand?

Review of Literature

1. Definition of Consumer perception

As times change, a number of brands and products are pouring out In line with the change. And when consumer first encounter such products and brands, the consumer has their own meaning and thoughts about them. In marketing, this is called consumer information processing. At this stage, all the senses of the consumer are involved in receiving brand marketing messages (Gianluigi GuidoPh.D. 2001).

1.1.1. Process of Consumer perception

And during the processing of consumer information, there are four distinct perception steps: Sensation, Attention, Interpretation and Retention.

Firstly, ‘Retention’ describes what happens when a people’s senses are first exposed to external stimuli, such as product or brand marketing. Consumers’ sensory receptors are involved with products or brands through five-sensory senses. For example, Starbucks, which people usually use, builds all the senses and relationships in sensuous brand marketing. Customers who enter Starbucks can hear their own music and enjoy Starbuck’s own coffee flavor and taste.

The following ‘Attention’ occurs when people stays at the external stimuli of the product or brand and gives them mental processing power during the processing of information. Selective perception is for consumers to pay attention to messages which do not match consumer attitudes, beliefs, and needs. And when a product or brand does not match these factors, the consumer will push out the attention.

‘Interpretation’ occurs when people accord meaning to sensory stimulation from product or brand marketing. ‘Interpretation’ help with expectations and familiarity with products or brands. Consumers recall consumers’ memories, bringing back their previous experience of the brand or similar brands.

Lastly, ‘Retention’ is the final step in the consumer perception process. This is indicated by storing the product or brand information in short- and long-term memory. The goal of marketers is to give positive stimulus to the process of consumers storing information about products or brands in long-term memory (CrossVanessa 2019).

1.1.2. Enhance Consumer perception

Customer perception is fluid. First, as the relationship between the customer and the company develops, consumer perception of the company and its products or services will change. As the customer experience increases, their perception will shift from factual judgments to more general meanings. Over time, consumers focus more on the results of product or service consumption. Moreover, when a customer’s situation changes, the customer’s needs and preferences often. In an external environment, if a competitors of customer’s existing product or brand create a better perception, the customer’s perception can be changed. There is also the fact that public opinion can be changed by certain issues (RecklesDagmar 2015).

• Add social media to the marketing mix- Social media can further accelerate two-way communication with consumers and enable them to share information in real time quickly.
• Communicate with customers both online and offline- Social media deals with more audience, but personal engagement allows business owners to create private relationships.
• Employees are the company’s top brand ambassadors- Every phone call they receive, every email they write or receive, and their product and service sales are all important. Because employees are the public ‘face’ of the company. Therefore, regular training and motivation should ensure that the customer’s recognition process is always and consistent with the services it provides to the customer no matter what stage it remains (CrossVanessa 2019).
• Increasing market share on customer perception- Increased market share can create positive perceptions by acting as an indicator of superior quality perceived by more and more other customers. This effect is especially powerful for products in the premium price range. Customers generally think that if they can achieve such unexpected market success despite their high prices, their reason is that the product is of superior quality. And the value of a product or service can rise as the number of users using it increases (RecklesDagmar 2015).

Definition of Marketing

With increased disposable income, consumers have begun to choose products or brands that they like. To cope with this trend, manufacturers have begun to produce a concept called ‘marketing’. In other words, marketing is about looking at the market from the perspective of consumers rather than from the perspective of producers. This new concept of ‘marketing’ has had an important impact on economy. Because of this reason, companies have shifted from production-oriented to marketing-oriented. This greatly increased the proportion of sales promotion, which was followed by the growth of advertising. But even if things have changed like this, we will still have to take the ads as the right view. That is, advertising is important, but it is just one of the elements of the marketing mix (Don E. SchultzStanley 1981).

Jerome E. McCarthy defined marketing as ‘4P’ management; product, place, price and promotion. In other words, to make a successful marketing plan, consumers must be able to buy the right ‘product’ at the right ‘place’ and right ‘price’, but appropriate ‘promotion’ should be combined to ensure consumers are aware of the product and the benefits from it. Advertising is part of the corporate promotion planning sector, but it is not the only factor (McCarthyE. 2011).

1.1.3. Definition of Marketing strategy

[bookmark: _Hlk26883394]Many pet food sale-stands in large-scale supermarkets have many brands on display, each with its own marketing strategy. In fact, pet food is basically all made to feed it. However, each brand has many products and carries a different message. The reason is that the products were developed to satisfy different consumer needs. For example, some dogs may need a lot of protein for growth, while some of others may need products with high levels of care for their fur. As such, the pet food market is very fragmented in the minds of consumers. And each brand is struggling to gain their place in the market. To occupy the market, one must be able to promise something different compared to other products, or to address the problem of different consumers’ differences and communicate it clearly (Don E. SchultzStanley 1981). This is the marketing strategy.

In other words, a marketing strategy is a form of marketing message that conveys the benefits or problem-solving characteristics that a product or service can give to a consumer. The key word here is ‘profit or problem-solving characteristics’. If a commitment in a marketing strategy fails to satisfy a consumer’s needs, does not solve a consumer’s problems, or does not provide the desired benefits, the strategy fails. In addition, the promises contained in the strategy should be important to consumers and not to producers or advertisers (Don E. SchultzStanley 1981).

Consumer perception and Marketing strategy

Jim Adams, the author of ‘Sparks off my Anvil’, said about the profits of producers and the interests of consumers: “People who design marketing do not start thinking about themselves or their products at first, but first about consumers who want them to buy the product. Since sales are done by consumers, you first start with your potential consumers’ minds in order to establish an appropriate marketing strategy. In order to change the way that consumers perceive your product to be superior to any other competitor, consumers need to figure out what they need to believe in your product. If you don’t, you will get nothing out of it, even through you may succeed in getting your marketing to believe. In fact, pure products alone do not attract even a small amount of interest from any consumer. Because a product only attracts consumers’ attention when it is changed to the term consumer satisfaction, and the consumer’s perception of it changes.” (AdamsJim 1958). And there are four conditions for establishing a good marketing strategy which can change consumer perception:

• Strategies must have measures to address consumer’s interests or consumer’s problems.
• The benefits or solutions must be what the consumer wants.
• The brand shall be directly linked to its profits problem-solving solutions
• The benefits or problem solving measures shall be communicated through marketing.

Positioning strategy

Previously, ‘positioning’ was the method which manufactures applied to their products to generate the benefits that would be provide to a particular group of people. But now it has a different meaning. As Trout and Ries said, “Positioning now refers to placing the product in the consumer’s mind through advertising.” The overall concept of positioning theory is that advertising is intended to give the product a place in the consumer’s mind or to establish a foothold (RiesJack 1969). Once that position is constructed, consumers will consider buy the product when consumer needs to get the benefits which product gives or the problems which consumer faces.

Positioning serves to ensure which the product meets all the needs of a particular class of consumers rather than advertising a product with special benefits. As an example, Michelob beer has strengthen image as the best U.S. premium beer ever by creating a “First class” position (Michelob 1961). While other strategies are the same, it is always important to keep in mind which ‘positioning’ should also provide benefits and problem solving to create a good perception for consumers.

Research Methodology

The paper seeks to investigate why Korea should import more than half of Korea’s pet food market, why Koreans do not use domestic brands, and the reason of this problem is a negative consumer perception, or whether it is a wrong marketing strategy. These needs for research will lead to primary and secondary data. To get the primary data, I will conduct a survey of Koreans residing in Korea and to get the secondary data, I will use literature research methods, including papers, Internet materials and government statistics which are related to pet industry, consumer perception, etc., to develop marketing strategies for the growth of the Korean pet food brand in Korea. Since the main data in this paper will be conducted on a large number of people for a broader and more objective study, it will be carried out as a quantitative study.

Anticipated Results

The survey will be performed on people living in South Korea. The survey is thought to be relatively easy to get feedback from people in Korea, but there is a question of whether the process can go smoothly, as the target to be interviewed is a South Korean conglomerate. And other articles will also be utilized to make the study clearer overall.

Planning (Tentative Schedule to Finish the Thesis)

S/N Tasks Deadlines

1 Literature Review Jan 13- Feb20, 2020

2 Survey and Data collection Feb 10- March 10, 2020

3 Thesis Feb 20- March 10, 2020

4 Reviewing Thesis March 15, 2020

5 Submission March 31, 2020

Budget

There would be no budget to get all information and data for this paper.

References

1. “280 billion won in imports and 17 billion won in exports…Pet Products Foreigner’s Owner’s.” 2019. http://news.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2019/09/11/2019091102262.html.
2. “280 billion won in imports and 17 billion won in exports…Pet Products Foreigner’s Owner’s.” 2019. 수입 2800억·수출 170억원…반려동물 제품 외국産 독주.
3. AdamsJim. “Sparks Off My Anvil.” 1958.
4. agencyand plant quarantineAnimal. “A Report on the Results of the 2015 National Survey on Animal Protection.” Animal and plant quarantine agency, 2015.
5. CrossVanessa. “The stages of Perception in Marketing.” 2019.
6. Don E. SchultzTannenbaumStanley. “Essentials of Advertizing strategy.” 1981. 53.
7. Gianluigi GuidoPh.D. “The salience of marketing stimuli an incongruity-salience Hypothesis on Consumer Awareness.” 2001.
8. McCarthyJeromeE. “4P’s of Marketing.” 2011.
9. Michelob. “In beer, going first class is MICHELOB.” 1961.
10. RecklesDagmar. “Understanding and Managing customer perception.” 2015.
11. RiesTrout & AlJack. “Positioning.” 1969.
12. “Special Estimation of Future household.” “StatisticsKorea.” 2019. file:///C:/Users/zld00/AppData/Local/Packages/Microsoft.MicrosoftEdge_8wekyb3d8bbwe/TempState/Downloads/Àå·¡°¡±¸Ãß°è%20º¸µµÀÚ·á(2017~2047)%20(1).pdf.
13. “The age of 10 million pets ‘Evolving petcony’.” 2019. http://biz.khan.co.kr/khan_art_view.html?artid=201911132102005&code=920100.
14. “The domestic pet market is worth 3 trillion won. Get the peddlers, get the petfam!” 2019. http://www.viva100.com/main/view.php?key=20191120010006117.

Abstract

Despite the recent growth in usage and adoption of social media as a marketing tool in globally to support firm operations through offering unique opportunities, very little empirical research focuses on Small and Medium Enterprises. The study is mainly focused to identify factors affecting towards adoption of social media marketing by SMEs in Sri Lanka. In particular, it measured the impact of top management perception, ease of use, facilitating conditions, and social influence on social media marketing adoption by SMEs. To test the proposed research hypothesis, it was administered a structured questionnaire to 150 SME managers. Results of the study concluded that top management perception, ease of use, and social influence significantly impact towards on social media marketing adoption by SMEs.

Keywords

Small and Medium Enterprises, Social Media, Social Media Marketing

Introduction

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are the novices in the business cycle and are identified as one of the main contributors to economic, development, and employment growth (Dahnil, Marzuki, Langgat, & Fabeli, 2014). The large-scale organization had a history of its childhood which it was in a small scale. The growth of the population cannot be handled with government careers. Consequently, the unemployment rate is going up in Sri Lanka. In 2017, it is indicated a 4.2 percent unemployment rate and first and second quarters of 2018 unemployment was 4.50 percent and 4.60 percentages respectively (Sri Lanka, 2018). It was acknowledged SMEs as the backbone of the economy of Sri Lanka and it is recorded as more than 75 fractions of the total number of enterprises which is provided 45 percent of the employment opportunities and 52 fraction contributions towards the Gross Domestic Production (GDP). As well as SMEs endorse broad-based on equitable development and deliver more opportunities for Women and Youth participation in the economic development of Sri Lanka (Ministry of industry commerce, 2017).

Despite it plays a major role in today’s world economy and the revolution of the internet and communication channel has transformed the way of conducting business today, SMEs is well known for having limitations and acceptance barriers in adopting new technology (Dahnil, Marzuki, Langgat, & Fabeli, 2014). Recently, a number of consumers engage with Social Networking Sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube getting higher and Social Media has become a new marketing communication tool in a rapid and dynamic pace (Godey, 2016). Furthermore, it is highlighted that internet usage of digital citizens in Sri Lanka going up at a weighty rate from 20 percent to 25 percent in every year, and starting from mid – 2016, the number of Facebook users increased from 4 million to 5 million and today it is 6 million users (Sorav Jain, 2018).

While having the technology adoption barriers, applying Social Media Marketing by SMEs might produce not only a lot of openings but can change the shape and nature of their trade all over the world (Dahnil, Marzuki, Langgat, & Fabeli, 2014). Moreover, it is highlighted that Businesses can reach to their targeted customer more easily with the advance of social media. In Sri Lanka, most of the top management in companies have a traditional marketing mindset and pose resistance to adopting a social media marketing strategy (S. Sabraz Nawaz, 2015). Accordingly, the technology-driven era guide to answer the question what are the factors affecting the Social Media Marketing adoption by SMEs? Hence, the study mainly focused to identify factors affecting towards adoption of social media marketing by SMEs in Sri Lanka.

Literature Review

Small and Medium Enterprises

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) haven’t been universally accepted definition and it is defined in a variety of ways using the benchmarks such as the total number of employees, annual turnover, and total investment. Not only the different countries but also different regions used different definitions within the country (Gamage, 2003). In the Sri Lanka context, Medium enterprises are defined as organizations that have less than 300 employees and earned 251 million to Rs.750 million turnovers per year. Furthermore, it is defined that Enterprises which is earned less than 250 million turnovers, and if the number of employees is between 11 to 50 it is called a small type organization (Ministry of industries and commerce, 2017). As well as SMEs has a significant contribution to many countries’ economies to achieve sustainable and inclusive growth (Dahnil, Marzuki, Langgat, & Fabeli, 2014). According to Wickramathilaka (Wickramathilaka, 2018), 75 percent of SMEs contribute 52 percent to the GDP and 45 percent contribute to employment.

Social Media

Social Networking Sites have become an interrelated phenomenon with the human blood because millions of social networking sites users tend to stay on their sites as a part of their daily lifecycle. And Social Networking Sites have turned into an important point of online communication rather than face-to-face communication (Kujath, 2011). As well as Friendster, Trible, LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter are the most popular social networking sites which can be identified in the world. Among them, Facebook is the most famous social networking site with the largest database that can be available to anyone through a valid e-mail address (Fonseka & Sakalasooriya, 2015). ). Furthermore, it is stated that Social Media is a medium to people intermingle to create, share, and exchange information in virtual social networks through internet-based applications. As a marketing tool, Social Media has significant differences such in quality, reach, usability, and frequency among others rather than other forms of media such as Television, Newspapers, Film, etc. Social Media not only reaches to centralize to one place or region like traditional media but also a variety of people to reach, attract and retain (Kaplan. A. M. & Haenlein M, 2010).

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing can be viewed as a new field and new business practices involved with marketing goods, services, information, and ideas via online social media (Dahnil, Marzuki, Langgat, & Fabeli, 2014). According to (Eagleman, 2013), Social Media offers a unique marketing communication method and social media is used as an extension of traditional marketing via online applications which allow to the production of information and collaboration among users (Kaplan. A. M. & Haenlein M, 2010). Besides, Social media influence mobile and web-based technologies to create a cooperative medium where users and groups member share, co-creating, discuss and modify known as user-generated content (Kietzmann, Hermkens, Mccarthy, & Silvestre, 2011). As well as through manipulating the user-produced content has enabled businesses to forecast the future purchasing behavior of their customers more accurately (Kim & Ko, 2011), heighten brand post popularity (Vries, Gensler, & Leeflang, 2012), attract new customers (Michaelidou, Siamagka, & Christodoulides, 2011), build consciousness, increase sales and build loyalty. Furthermore (Michaelidou, Siamagka, & Christodoulides, 2011) distinguished that using social media does not require an excessive financial investment relatively low cost.

Related Theoretical Model of Technology Adoption

Technology Acceptance Model (TAM)

Davis et al (1989) originally formulated Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) in an endeavor to understand why people agree or throw away information Systems (Davis. F.D, 1986). TAM is one of the most popular and widely used theoretical models for predicting and explaining whether users will accept the development and application of new IT or other systems. Furthermore, the previous meta-research highlighted that TAM is a flexible tool for measuring user acceptance as well as examining and evaluating strategies that promote user acceptance (Y.Lee, 2003). Moreover, Bernadette szanjna (Szanjna, 1996)confirmed that TAM is a valuable tool for predicting the intention to use an Information system. According to Fanny, 2015 TAM is most utilized and powerful framework for understanding and predicting on technology adoption when relating to other models. To determine the behavioral intention towards technology applications, which consequently affect the persons’ behavior TAM postulates that people’s attitudes towards various behaviors and subjective criteria (Davis. F.D, 1986). TAM indicates that technology adoption is based on two constructs: perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness (Davis. F.D, 1986).Figure 1: Technology Acceptance Model Source: (Davis. F.D, 1986)

Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT)

The Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology model (UTAUT) was formulated with linking eight dominants and frameworks which is included Dispersal of Innovations Theory, Decomposed Social Cognitive Theory, Motivational Model, Model of PC Utilization and Technology Acceptance Model (Venkatesh. V. & Morris. M, 2013). Social influence, facilitating condition, performance expectancy and effort expectancy are four main influential elements in UTAUT. According to Gunther & Krasnova, 2009 UTAUT and Technology Acceptance Model is used to define social media adoption in the business environment and it is discussed the adoption factor as personal intention or the usage behavior of an entrepreneur towards a system. Figure 2: UTAUT Model Source: (Venkatesh. V. & Morris. M, 2013)

Social Media Marketing Adoption Factors by SMEs

It was reviewed the literature by determining the preliminary databases that could be considered as possible publications outlets in the field of Electronic Marketing, Internet Marketing, and Social Media Marketing. As the theories and methodologies applied in the literature related to domains such as E-Marketing, Internet Marketing, E-Business, and E-commerce are mostly highlighted the following factors such as top management perception (Sarah Tsitsi Chikandiwa, 2013), ease of use (Davis. F.D, 1986), social influence (Venkatesh. V. & Morris. M, 2013), and facilitating conditions (Venkatesh. V. & Morris. M, 2013) as the factors impact on social media marketing adoption.

Top management perceptions

Porter and Miller formulated an integrated model of information system (IS) adoption of SMEs and determined that top management perception or characteristics are mainly impact to the SMEs adoption (Michael E. Porter, 2016). Furthermore, it was used top management support as a factor that significantly impacts the IS adoption of the business (GPremkumar, 1999). As well as (Ministry of industry and commerce, 2017)stated that promoting, facilitating and supporting entrepreneurship development, conducting awareness programs and building capacity at schools, universities, technical and vocational training institutions and focusing on Youth and Women, and strengthening the capacity of institutions providing a training and skills development on entrepreneurship and SME development for enhancing the businesses managers perception towards gaining competitive advantages within the modern world. Accordingly, the first hypothesis is formulated as,

1. H1: There is a significant impact of top management perceptions towards social media marketing adoption by SMEs.

Ease of use

In 1986 Technology Acceptance Model (Davis. F.D, 1986) highlighted that Ease of use affected towards on using or adoption of information systems. Moreover, it was emphasized that ease of use is the vital thing that is why people use Social media marketing for their marketing activities (Gbadeyan. R. A, 2010). Accordingly, the second hypothesis is formulated as,

1. H2: There is a significant impact of ease of use on social media marketing adoption by SMEs.

Social influence

(Venkatesh. V. & Morris. M, 2013) As stated in their study social influence as a condition that needs to be considered at the technology adoption framework. Moreover, it is highlighted that when using social media, online network service information sharing attitude and Internet end user’ behavior is highly affected by Social influence and it acts as the main role that influencing adoption of social media as well as social media marketing (Kim & Ko, 2011).

1. H3: There is a significant impact of social influence on social media marketing adoption by SMEs.

Facilitating condition

(Venkatesh. V. & Morris. M, 2013) Formulated that UTAUT framework with facilitation condition which is the impact to users’ behavioral intention of using new technology.

1. H4: There is a significant impact of facilitating conditions for social media marketing adoption by SMEs.

Methodology

In order to conduct a study for social media marketing adoption by SMEs, the primary data collection method was applied to collect data relating to “top managers;’ requirements, perspectives about the social media marketing adoption by SMEs”. A structured questionnaire with 27 questions and consisted with close-ended and five Likert scale questions were filled by 150 respondents from Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Sri Lanka. Scarified method was used to select the sample from 81,531 (Statistics, 2015) population. The five Likert scale questions it was measured the adoption of Social Media Marketing. In behalf of that, an examination of research articles, books, and websites regarding the factors affecting the adoption of social media marketing was used as a method of secondary data collection.

Finding and Discussion

The sample of the study was made up with 73 firms from the manufacturing sector, 55 firms from the service sector and the remaining from the retailer sector. The contribution from the male portion is 62 percent and 38 percent from the female part. Furthermore, the demographic profile highlighted that most of the respondents are owned to age 20 to 30 category (56.7%) and 51 to 60 category is denoted least participation (0.7%) as the Small and medium entrepreneur.

The reliability of the construct was confirmed that the items are most suitable to test the social media marketing adoption by SMEs by exceeding all Cranach’s alpha values by more than 0.7.

The correlational results of table 1 clearly show that social media marketing adoption factors such as top management perceptions, social influence, facilitating conditions, and ease of use have significantly positively correlated with social media marketing adoption by SMEs at the 0.01 level.

According to the multiple regression results presented in table 2, all the predictors of the model (Top management’s perception, Social Influence, Facilitating conditions, and Ease of use) explained 40.4 percent variation in social media adoption behavior. F value, 26.254, with p

There are different digital marketing strategies since prioritizing is very important; it can get a little overwhelming when you’re trying to decide which one type of strategy to implement. Marketers looking for the ultimate digital marketing strategy need to have a, product, and demographics before choosing a digital marketing strategy that will be effective for their needs. When it comes to your digital marketing campaigns, you should avoid wasting your time by targeting the wrong demographics with your strategy, keeping in in mind that your lead generation efforts could drain your pockets if not properly implemented.

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is a term that applies to online marketing efforts. It includes the use of online marketing channels like search engines, social media, and websites to connect with customers. Some people simply call it online marketing. Digital marketing strategy or plan both are the same things defining a set of actions that could help you in achieving your goals based on the latest Digital marketing trends.

So, a digital marketing strategy is a marketing strategy focusing on the digital side, fairly self-explanatory. Your business may have already implemented a digital strategy, or you may think your business does fine with traditional marketing, which it might at the moment. But trends show that more and more people and businesses are using the internet as the main resource in purchasing decisions and research. Meet your customers where they are – on the web, with a digital marketing strategy.

How to structure a digital marketing plan?

An integrated digital strategy will give you a foundation for all the key online marketing activities we recommend in the digital marketing planning framework. You can use essential multichannel marketing activities covering all parts of the customer life-cycle like:

• Plan – which is the most important, Use a data-driven approach to review your current digital marketing effectiveness, customize analytics, set up SMART objectives create a strategy of prioritized improvements to how you deploy digital marketing media, technology and data to increase leads and sales
• Reach – Build awareness using online marketing techniques that will drive visits to your site.
• Act – Encourage interactions on your website or social media to help you generate leads for future
• Convert – Use re-targeting, nurturing and conversion rate optimization to remind and persuade your audience to buy online or offline if phone and face-to-face channels if these are important to you.
• Engage – Increase sales from existing customers by improving personalized communications using web, email and social media marketing with customized re-targeting.

1. Determine What You Want to Accomplish

What do you want your digital marketing strategy to accomplish? Do you want to build name brand recognition? Do you need to Generate leads? Get more sales, or email subscribers? Great! Whatever it is that you want, though, you need to plan it and make it happen. This is yet another way that marketing has an online dating crossover comparison. If you go on a bunch of blind dates with no idea what you’re looking for, you might settle down with the first person who you can tolerate. If you have an actual list of traits you want in a person, you’re much more likely to find your match. Your goals matters, and you’ll need to take specific steps to accomplish each one. We’ll look at this more in-depth a little further down.

2. Research your target audience

Making assumptions is a dangerous game for marketers. And thanks to the sheer wealth of demographic data and social media analytics tools out there, you really don’t have to get confused about finding your audience anymore. So much of what you need to know about your audience to influence your social media marketing strategy is already out in the open for you, you only need to select, customize and keep going. Take today’s social media demographics. These numbers speak directly to which networks your brand should approach and what types of content to publish. Here are some key takeaways:

• Facebook and YouTube are both prime places for ads due in part to their high-earning user bases.
• The majority of Instagram’s are millennials or Gen Z, signaling the strength of bold, eye-popping content that radiates with personality.
• Women vastly outnumber men on Pinterest, which is noted to boast the highest average order value for social shoppers, if you have a product targeting women, well.. Pinterest should be your prime target.
• LinkedIn’s user base is well-educated, making it a hub for in-depth, industry-specific content that might be more complicated than what you see on Facebook or Twitter.

See how no platform is one-size-fits-all? And although the demographics data above gives you insight into each channel, what about your own customers? Further analysis needs to be done before you can truly know your customer demographics on social media. That’s why many brands use a social media dashboard which can provide an overview of who’s following you and how they interact with you on each channel.

3. Start blogging now.

Sure, you could start a blog. If you don’t have a blog for your business, then you need to start one immediately. Most people find blogging mundane because they lack visibility. The truth is that your blog is going to be like a barren desert unless you know what you’re doing. But this isn’t just about posting your ideas on your own blog. You should start authority blogging. Use platforms like Medium to post content. Answer questions on Quora and Reddit. Or get out there onto LinkedIn’s publishing platform. These are all authority domains that anyone can post on, which have massive audiences, giving you instant and immediate reach right now. When you do blog, ensure that you blog effectively. Don’t post thin content. Think about adding value. Worried about revealing all your business secrets? Don’t be. Give people so much value that you instantly become an authority in their eyes. This is one of the most powerful strategies you can use to market any business.

4. Content Marketing

Content marketing is a big part of attracting a targeted audience. What’s essential about content marketing is that you need to make your content valuable, relevant, and consistent to make it worth the time of those consuming it. In today’s time, you need to focus on creating content that can solve pain points and stay evergreen. Using shortcuts or black hat SEO tactics just to move to the top of search engines won’t work anymore, a hard slap which will take you to page 59 will be on your way as soon as you get caught, thanks to Google’s all-seeing eye. As they say, “content is king,” but only if we execute it correctly. It’s essential to keep in mind that everything you do for your business growth counts as content, whether it’s in the form of text, images, or videos. As a brand, it’s crucial to focus on mobile-optimized content, native advertising, email content, and other forms of content. However, this content will not be effective unless it’s appropriately distributed to your audience through blog posts, websites, social media, email, and SMS marketing, using marketing automation tools. Think seriously about mobile content because smartphones are already making up 50% of all global devices. This is going to affect digital advertising, and how influencers promote your brand. Automation tools send content to prospects on their mobile devices at just the right times.

5. Email marketing

Each time you publish a new blog post, you should send out a newsletter. It takes minutes to do, and it sends thousands of people to your blog. But this didn’t happen overnight… In this way, you can easily build your email list, in a short amount of time you can have tens of thousands of subscribers who actually want to hear from you. So if you haven’t yet pulled the trigger when it comes to email marketing, the best time to start is right now.

There are plenty of ways to do that, but blogging with SEO in mind is the best long-term strategy. The next step is to convince those people to sign up to your newsletter. There are lots of tips and tricks for doing this: Lead magnets, content upgrades, etc. But the thing that unites all of these tactics is providing something of value. It might be a PDF version of the post (content upgrade), a free 7 day email course (lead magnet), or something else. Just remember that list building is not something with a beginning and an end. It’s an ongoing process, so don’t put off emailing your list because you’re scared it’s not big enough. Make an effort to keep subscribers engaged and send them valuable information — even if you don’t have many. Do that consistently over time, and you’ll have an engaged, responsive list of people that actually enjoy hearing from you.

6. Choose The Channels You Want to Use

In your digital marketing campaign you will probably want to utilize as many channels as possible. If you are a business to business company you should not be using the exact same channels as a business to Consumer Company. You can advertise on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and even Pinterest. Google Ads are popular as well and can quickly get your company website to the top of search results. As we mentioned the importance of email marketing above, Don’t leave email marketing out of your digital marketing campaign. Sending emails is often neglected by companies but this is one of the best ways to grow your business. A combination of marketing on social media channels, sending emails, optimizing your website and using Google to advertise can build a strong strategy if done correctly. With all of these strategies working together, there’s a lot of room for user error. Of course, you can learn how to build an amazing digital marketing campaign yourself.

Sales Growth with 185% by Offering Highly Qualitative Case Studies

Smart and effective digital tactics are a gold mine. Case studies as well. Not to mention the conversion optimization rates you can get with them. Case studies have a huge potential to grow traffic, sales, and revenue if you offer quality results and show your product brings value. The Content Marketing Institute conducted research where they saw that 63% of UK marketers believe that case studies are an effective digital marketing tactic. Case studies are the fifth most popular marketing tactic used out of 12, after social media, newsletters, blogs and blog posts. Neil Patel, one of the top 10 marketers according to Forbes, conducted a study to see the influence of the use of case studies on his own site. He witnessed a growth in his revenue by 185%.

Growth Hacking

If you’ve been paying attention to recent trends in the digital marketing industry lately, you probably have heard a fair amount about growth hacking. In growth hacking, every strategy you execute, tool you install, and technique that you use to gain traction is informed by your desire for growth. Often, in growth hacking, traditional processes take a back seat to results. Growth hackers view the digital landscape as a battleground and see their job as fighting in that battleground and rising above the competition at whatever the cost. They use data as their weapon and creativity as they vehicle.

Growth hacking often employs small techniques, known as “hacks”, that help companies to drive demand and growth. Often, these strategies are in a moral gray area, which is one of the reasons why growth hacking has remained on the outskirts as a strategy. However, companies see the results that the practice is able to provide and want it for themselves, which is why we will see growth hacking take an even larger jump into mainstream marketing circles in 2020. Try these simple digital marketing strategies out on your website and see for yourself how much of a difference they can make. If you want your business to grow, digital marketing is the place to start.

Part A

Introduction

The purpose of this essay is to explain what leadership challenges Wirkkala may face while keeping the company united in its development goals. Wirkkala was started by four university friends after they completed their graduation. The company was doing well in the starting periods, but after some years company started to face some issues regarding leadership and management. In this essay I will discuss about the crisis Wirkkala is facing and will critically evaluate and discuss the research and theories around the topic. Firstly there is a brief of leadership challenges Wirkkala may face. After that there is a detailed explanation of each challenge Wirkkala may face with relation to the relevant theories. The third para of the main body includes challenge of lack of experience among the directors, followed by lack of transparency, lack of Human resource management for growing globally, followed by the difference of opinions among the leaders and at the end there is a detailed description of what leadership challenges Wirkkala may face when it will expand itself to a global level. It is very necessary for Wirkkala to overcome these leadership challenges if the company wants to be successful in this competitive market.

Main body/ discussion

A leader is a person who works hard for achieving his goals and guides his colleagues towards the right path. Leadership is one of the most essential part of an organization. The leadership challenge is about how leaders assemble others to need to influence remarkable things to occur in organizations. It’s about the practices heads use to change esteems into activities, dreams into substances and threats into rewards (Kouzes & Posner, 2012). There are many challenges Wirkkala is facing. Some of the leadership challenges are beneath the leaders and some are faces by the leaders and some will be faced in the future. In this essay I am going to focus on four main leadership challenges that Wirkkala is facing they are: 1) Lack of experience among the directors, 2) Lack of transparency among the directors, 3) Lack of Human resource management for future development goals, 4) There are different opinions among the leaders and 5) Expansion of company on a global level.

Firstly we are going to talk about lack of experience among the directors. According to Alati (2004) 60% of the companies have leadership challenge regarding the collaboration of the leaders. All the four directors are university graduates so they don’t have enough experience in the global world. Experience is one of the most essential element of leadership and its development. Like if we take example of Diane Ugbede who has studied Business and Management but now she is playing a role in product development which is not the appropriate use of her skills and she often ends up conflicting with Kristine. Also the four members hold informal meeting once in a quarter so that is also considered as one of the major challenges in leadership because all the directors doesn’t work from the office and they don’t even conduct formal meetings so not everyone does not has an overview of what company is going through and what is the development of the company. Also the directors (leaders) employ the people who are newly graduates. The newly graduates have no experience of working in an external word and they need training. It takes a lot of time and effort to give training those employees and make them fit so they can work effectively for Wirkkala. This is also one of the major challenge of leadership because the investors would prefer experienced employees rather than newly graduates as they don’t need to be trained.

The second challenge faced by Wirkkala is related to lack of transparency. Transparency is very essential to avoid conflicts among the leaders or directors. Effective communication is one of the main key for collaborative leadership (Doherty, et al., 2018). According to the above mentioned theory it is very necessary to have communication between the leaders and everything related to company should be open and accessible to each and every member. In Wirkkala one of the challenge noticed was lack of transparency among the directors. Previously they all understood that how important it was to share information amongst one another but gradually the situations changed. They thought that if one person had some information that person used it as power. Some of them used to hide the important information and some shared information occasionally. The problem of obtaining precise data in such critical conditions can cause there are frequent problems in company’s long term and short term goals (Abidi, et al., 2013). Through this we can understand that how important it is to share information with every leader in the company. Also there is lack of transparency between the all the tree departments of the company i.e. the tree units don’t share the common information with one another. There are many different systems and it is very complex sometimes to work with multiple systems. Strategic alignment is the procedure and the aftereffect of connecting an association’s structure and assets with its system and business condition. There is lack of strategic alignment in the company and also the organisational goals are not clear. So this is a leadership challenge related to Information System (IS) as the leaders are not able to develop proper IS and this doesn’t give proper organisational goals and the company has no direction to go. Because of these things lack of transparency can be considered as one of the biggest drawbacks and leadership challenge Wirkkala may face when they keeping company united in its development goals.

Human Resource Management (HRM) is one of the most essential part in any organization. The key challenge of manager or owner of any company is to search, hire and motivate the employees. This is one of the key role of HRM or in other words we can say that this is only HRM (Dunn, 2010). Kristine Kochanski who is one of the directors of Wirkkala is in charge of managing people. Because she has studied psychology she enjoys to do it. But this will work when Wirkkala is working on a small scale, when the company will plan to expand its networks and will plan to go global then this HRM system will be ineffective. The company is planning for a global expansion and so there will be increase in production as well so there will be more employees in the company and just one person looking back for HRM won’t work. These days’ effective organizations should be versatile, strong, client focused and quick to alter course. Inside such a domain the viability of HRM is crucial to business achievement (Griffith College, 2018). Here this may be a major leadership challenge when Wirkkala will go global. The company has no proper HR department which a leadership challenge because without Hr department the company cannot complete its goals of hiring good quality people.

Moving on to the next leadership challenge is that of difference of opinions between the leaders. Trust has progressively been viewed as the key component in the ethical economy of contemporary associations, both inside among the board and work and remotely between discrete yet teaming up associations (Wang & Clegg, 2002). Through this we can understand that trust is an important element in an organisation. Not only trust but all the leaders should agree to one decision and work accordingly. If they don’t agree on an anonymous decision then they end up putting the organisation in trouble. Same is the problem with Wirkkala, here Alison feels that the company is ready for expansion and move to the consultancy services as well. Diane is ok with Alison’s decision and ready to work with her, but Kristine and Anne think that if they will take that step then the main motto of the company will shift to consultancy thing. So here this is a major challenge that not all members are ready to accept one decision that may be beneficial for the company. This leadership challenge of difference in opinion may lead to conflicts between the members of the company. Also as mentioned previously that Diane is not happy with her role as it is not fit for her according to her skills and she has conflicts with Kristine, so this is an another example of difference in opinion between the leaders. This difference can play a major role in preventing the development of the company.

Rondinelli & Heffron (2009) argues that understanding the nature and starting points of specific types of individual and authoritative initiative is critical for accomplishing monetary, social and political that advance peaceful humanistic development. Development itself is a procedure of progress that expects pioneers to assemble human, monetary and physical assets and to change individual and organisational behaviour. This is an essential element for every leader to help them to expand business globally. Here globalisation may be a leadership challenge for Wirkkala because the leaders are not experienced enough. Also there are conflicts going on in the company. The organisational structure of the company is also not well structured. So because of these factors Wirkkala may face leadership challenges in globalisation. Also one major factor that will affect Wirkkala in going global is the Brexit. It is a word that is used for UK leaving the European Union (EU). Because of Brexit there is going to be a huge change in economies of both Europe and UK and it going to be a challenge to trade easily between the two nations. Right now importing and exporting within the EU is simple but after the Brexit everything including the policies will change so this will be the most major challenge Wirkkala will face if they plan for globalisation. The leaders here have to start with all new strategies, trade will be difficult because of new policies and also they are less experienced so this may cause a big challenge to leaders. Also the two of the four leaders are planning to make Wirkkala a global brand so this is going to be very difficult as Brexit will play a major role and the changing policies will become the leadership challenges for the leaders to make this step forward for global expansion. Another challenge the leaders of Wirkkala may face is the challenge of privacy and data protection. The privacy policy differs from country to country and state to state so if Wirkkala plans to go global then leaders will face a lot of problems with the privacy and data protection of their customers as they have to understand the policies of every country differently.

Conclusion

In present time there is a huge need of cooperation and collaboration for efficient management practice and also for the betterment of the company (House, et al., 2004). I would like to conclude by saying that there are many challenges a leader will face while developing his company to next stage. Here in Wirkkala there are many leadership Challenges Company is facing and if the company wants to grow efficiently and faster than it is necessary for the company to overcome these leadership challenges. The main challenge Wirkkala may face while developing future goals is lack of transparency and difference of opinions among the leaders. Due to these challenges there are a lot of conflicts between the leaders and that hinders the development of the company. Out of all the challenges Wirkkala needs to work on these two challenges to overcome the future development goals. With these leadership challenges prevailing in the company Wirkkala there will be no unity among the leaders and then the leaders will take a wrong decision which will be not appropriate for the company. The difficulties of systematic change where progressive system is deficient will, I trust, push us to new perspectives on administration dependent on new standards. These difficulties can’t be met by confined courageous leaders. They will require a one of a kind blend of various individuals, in various positions, who lead in various ways. Hence it is very necessary to maintain coordination and discipline between the leaders in order to overcome these challenges.

Part B

Introduction

The essay will discuss about the challenges and advantages Wirkkala may face while identifying a clear digital marketing strategy. And after that we will focus on the ethical and privacy issues company may face. This part of essay is mainly focused on what will help the company to develop in future and also what are the problems they have to tackle to. Firstly there is a brief introduction to digital marketing and what digital marketing strategy is. The purpose of this is to understand how challenges and advantages will relate to Wirkkala while identifying the strategy. The second part focuses on the challenges like the challenge of adoption of technology, skills and privacy challenges. These are the major challenges that the company is going to face. After that the third part is the advantages and benefits of the strategy the company will adopt. The advantages include the advantage of learning which will give the competitive advantage to the company. After that the second advantage focusses on the benefit of gathering the information for creating customer values and the last advantage describes about how information from various sources will help the company to adopt a particular technology and benefit the process of identifying an ideal digital marketing strategy. At the end the final part gives a grief regarding what ethical and privacy challenges the company may face while developing itself and for future goals. These ethical and privacy challenges are considered the most because the customers are really worried about their information and if the information is not handled properly then it can create a bad impact on the company and also it is not ethical.

Main body/ discussion

The Internet is changing the tenets of rivalry and imagining new esteem suggestions. The progressions made conceivable by the Internet are vital and essential (Ghosh, 1998). The cooperation and mix between digital channels and customary channels is a key piece of digital marketing strategy improvement. Digital marketing strategy is basically a channel marketing strategy and it should be coordinated with different channels (Chaffey & Ellis-Chadwick., 2012). Through this we can understand that is it very necessary to build channels for developing the digital marketing strategy. In today’s world digital marketing is very essential for growth of the business via online platforms. A right and proper digital marketing strategy can help the company to grow better and establish its developing goals. There are many advantages and challenges of adapting a digital marketing strategy for a company.

Now coming to the challenges that Wirkkala may face while identifying an ideal digital marketing strategy. There are many challenges Wirkkala can face or Wirkkala will face and some challenges are inevitable. One major challenge is the challenge of technology. This can be a challenge because the brave business leaders are ready to take risks for clear reasons (Kingsnorth, 2016). Digital marketing is closely linked with technology it can be a barrier for identifying an ideal strategy for the company. For example for paid searches, display advertising and social media marketing needs technology and this technology cannot be built, they have to buy the technology. Buying such technology costs a lot of money so it is a challenge for identifying digital marketing strategy. With the invention of new technology there are a lot many changes that are to be made within the system. Also it is a challenge because it needs to gain support from the leaders for its adoption. Also the technology needs a lot of testing and examining and so it becomes a huge wastage of time and resources.

The next challenge is the challenge of skills that are necessary to operate these technological instalments. As we saw earlier how important role technology plays in digital marketing it is equally important to have skills to operate or work under such technological environment. When there is introduction of new technology and new customer behaviour service there is a lack of experience around them. There is no data regarding what is to be done and what will be the limitations or the advantages of introduction of this new technology into the business (Kingsnorth, 2016). If Wirkkala is introducing new technology then it may also need some skilled workers with a lot of experience of how to work with such technology and how to overcome the limitations that will come when they identify an ideal digital marketing strategy. To overcome this problem of skills Wirkkala has only two options, one is to train the current workers (which will take a lot of time) and other one is to recruit pre trained workers (this will utilise a lot of financial resources of the company). Thus based upon the above arguments we can say that skills will also be a major challenge along with the introduction of technology for Wirkkala while they are identifying the digital marketing strategy.

The other challenge is privacy and data protection, this will also play a major role while we identify a perfect digital marketing strategy. These challenges are the two sides of the same coin. Every country and every state has different sets of rules and regulations. The challenge Wirkkala may face is regarding the understanding ideal principles of data usage, customer protection and usage. People now a days are very cautious about the data so it is necessary to keep the data safe and secure so that privacy of people is not breached and everything is kept confidential. Also cloud storage is another problem that can be faced during this process. If they overcome this challenge during the process of developing the digital marketing strategy then they can reach another milestone and the success of the company will be at a global level.

Every coin has two sides, one side always favours us and other side is exactly opposite to our thinking. After the challenges now we will focus on the advantages Wirkkala will have while identifying a digital marketing strategy, the first advantage is the role of learning in creating competitive advantage (Day, 1994). This process includes learning about the market and customers and their needs. So while developing digital marketing strategy for Wirkkala the company needs to learn about the marketplace and customers. By doing this Wirkkala will gain a competitive advantage in the market place. By doing this the company will also gain some loyal customers. The first part of the digital marketing campaign should start with a question that, what is the company all about? (Zahay, 2015). So by learning about the company will give competitive advantage in the market while the company is identifying its digital marketing strategy.

The second advantage or the second step is to gather information about the activities that will help in the creation of values for and by the customers (Porter, 1985). These information are regarding inbound supply chain, internal operations, marketing and sales, post sales service and customer co-relation. This is a complex system to get information about the customer needs and perform digital marketing activities accordingly. This system helps will help to identify the customer trend and then deliver the information along the chain. This process is essential while we identify the digital marketing strategy because this process gives us in-depth knowledge about the customers as well as market trend. Wirkkala will also have the benefit of this thing when the company is identifying the appropriate digital marketing strategy. If the company has appropriate information then it will be easy to find their target market and work accordingly. The customer plays a positive role in relation between the values and value chain (Zahay, 2015). The process of product development and management, customer relationship management and supply chain management also adds values to the company’s customers in different ways (Zahay and Handfield, 2004).

And finally the firm gets the information from suppliers, competitors, customers and employees and then use that information for creating a great value for digital marketing development. Also the technology helps to create values at some points. The digital marketing technology helps to target a huge market and attracts more customers as compared to traditional one-to-one marketing method. For today’s world Google trends can be a useful tool in developing strategies. It is useful because it gives detailed information of the world of internet on real time basis. This information needs constant updating and should be continuously and if it is done efficiently then it can be a good competitive advantage. So technology helps to get information and information helps to form an efficient digital marketing strategy for the business.

Now coming to the ethical and privacy challenges the company may face while they keep the company’s development in mind in consideration of digital marketing. There are many challenges the company may face regarding the ethics and privacy related to the customer’s information and data. The development of web and the capacity to oversee huge scale databases in an ongoing manner has implied that advertisers can find out about us that we truly may need them to know and to follow our conduct online through assortment of components. According to the act of privacy (Carey, 1998) the data should be processed fairly and lawfully. There is an assumption that the data from where it is obtained is obtained fairly and from an authorised source. It is very complicated to obtain lawfully processed data (Tapp, et al., 2014). The challenge Wirkkala will face here is of collection of data. As stated above how difficult it is to get new technology, and without technology it is more difficult to obtain such fair and lawful data. The second thing is the data which they obtain should be accurate and should be the latest one. The data which is obtained should be relevant, and not excessive. According to the ICO’s office the data should be collected minimum and it should consist of less personal data that is required to fulfil the company’s needs. The IOC has termed this as ‘Data Minimisation’ (The Information Commission’s Office, 2012). This can be challenge for Wirkkala as they don’t know how to collect the data and how to keep it adequately.

The one major concern is the Cookie policy. The European Union (EU) had a law namely e-Privacy Directive (EUR-Lex, 2015). This law makes sure that every person agrees to the cookie policy before entering the website. There are exclusions and the directive itself isn’t excessively prescriptive, which gives adaptability. There are many apps whose functioning needs collection of user’s location data (Kingsnorth, 2016). This can be a great privacy issue because some people do not want to share their location or tell in public about their place of existence. So this can be a challenge for Wirkkala as well as in how to prevent not to breach the privacy of their customers. Cloud storage is another area of concern where individual’s personal data is kept out of the reach of individual itself. Wirkkala may also face problem with this thing. One of the major that that can hinder one’s privacy is social media sites. These sites keep individual’s personal data in open and everyone can have an excess to anyone’s data without their permission. This is also a challenge for Wirkkala as in how to keep their customers satisfied by making them sure that their data is safe and sound.

Conclusion

Nowadays, in the world of internet and technology, the traditional methods of marketing are now on the verge of extinction. Because of technological advancement, the trend has shifted to digital marketing from traditional marketing. The more social we become the more personalized goods and services we get and this is because of big data analytics (Kotler, et al., 2016). By this we can understand that how important digital marketing is. So Wirkkala will have to identify an ideal digital strategy and overcome the above-mentioned challenges and take the benefit of the advantages. Also the company will have to overcome the privacy and ethical challenges that may hinder the company’s development goals and also can play a negative role in the company’s goodwill which will eventually lead to the loss of customers. Hence to conclude, Wirkkala can become very successful globally if it overcomes the challenges and identifies the perfect digital marketing strategy.

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Volkswagen Group is a worldwide car producer was positioning among the main 5 brand-driven OEMs in 2015 and driving the traveller car section with 9.8MM deals. Volkswagen manufacture cars to help people from any social class can afford from their budget. With a long history (set up in 1937), Volkswagen has insisted its position and notoriety internationally and is acclaimed for its Volkswagen Golf line. When tuning in to the name Volkswagen Golf, it is about the picture of an excellent and moderate vehicle, great motor and sensible cost. It is known as the best AWD hatchback and The Golf has consistently been mainstreaming because of its mind-boggling execution and taking care of, and this cycle just enhanced that. Volkswagen Golf has been having the eighth era, the first was delivered from the late spring of 1974.

Implements Strategically

The company gather information on and investigate three key pointers for the significant traveller vehicle creating brands: net advertiser score, dependability rate, triumph rate. The vehicle brand additionally has guarantee: 2-year maker and 1-year merchant and 12-year structure security.

In the initial a half year of the current budgetary year, the business income of the Volkswagen Gathering developed by 4.9 percent to €125.2 (119.4) billion contrasted and the principal half of 2018. Gathering deals income up by 4.9 percent to €125.2 (119.4) billion (Volkswagen 2019). Today, Volkswagen is serving the various sections in Singapore. Hence it is basic to situate the Golf to address the issues and catch most of the Singapore vehicle showcase.

The Volkswagen Passenger Cars division spoke to the biggest supporter of the organization’s income with an income portion of around 35% in 2019. Buyers in China and Hong Kong purchased very nearly tenfold the number of Volkswagen-badged vehicles as vehicle customers in the US. Volkswagen and individual German vehicle brands had a 24% portion of the Chinese market among January and November 2019.

As far as income, Toyota and Volkswagen were the main automakers worldwide in 2019. As far as vehicle deals and income, Toyota and Volkswagen are considered as a real part of the best automakers around the world. Moreover, the Volkswagen Golf contends in the hatchback advertise with contender hatchback models from Toyota, Mazda and Honda (Navoda, 2012).

Marketing Concept

It has been 83 years since Volkswagen first jump into automobile manufacturing industry and famous for been called ‘people’s car’. Therefore, the company’ strategy is to focus on 18-24 years old people that are single and young and easy to afford. Beyond, married couples with children who concerned on safety and space and retired couple who may not care about speed or modern technology would be on targeted.

A creation framework which utilizes the upsides of large-scale manufacturing. Volkswagen fans will recollect the people from Wolfsburg figured out how to pack a W12 motor inside a Golf about 10 years back and as of late they had a tremendous mixture idea fitted with gullwing entryways. In addition, the R400 will undoubtedly develop into a street-going vehicle, perhaps as a R420 model to mirror its additional force.

Volkswagen Golf is the greatest selling model of Volkswagen in worldwide with seventh- generation since the first one was produced in 1974 that has as of recently selling more than 25 million pieces around the globe. Another advantage of an item augmentation is it upgrades client devotion to Volkswagen and furthermore pulls in new clients. As a result, they will spread positive verbal exchange of Volkswagen Golf vehicles (Linton, 2016). Subsequent to discharging the first Volkswagen Golf vehicle in Singapore, Volkswagen has been including new innovation and reviving the outside and inside plans of the vehicle. The most recent range likewise incorporates the most developed motor, security highlights and a cool outside viewpoint. In 2015, Golf R-Line the new Golf has a friendly mode for family, with new highlights like the all-encompassing sunroof (Volkswagen Singapore, 2016). Volkswagen can expand the Golf vehicle item life cycle by adding new developments to the current golf vehicle all the time, similar to the innovative highlights, propelled motor, outside and inside structures (Lorette, 2016).

The high contribution to nature in the buy choice requires a broad buyer manner of thinking and makes high post-buy cacophony. Individual retailing will be led by the business power from retail tasks, to give data, address purchaser concerns to manufacture relational relationship. This customized experience delivers vulnerability of purchasers to inspire buy choice.

Customary promoting systems, for example, TV or magazines will be utilized to arrive at an enormous objective crowd. This makes more prominent intrigue towards the Golf as needs be to the psychographic profile of the objective market who esteems trusted and recognizable brands. Communicating advertising through online life stages, for instance, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram fill in as commitment devices and make two-way correspondence.

Marketing Objectives

Volkswagen has a technique to expand deals of the Golf by 80% inside 3 years and increment piece of the pie in Singapore to 25%. They expect the business income of the Volkswagen Group to develop by up to 4% in 2020 and the business income of the Passenger Cars Business Area to be tolerably higher than the earlier year figure and the organization also gauge a working profit for deals in the scope of 6.5%–7.5% in 2020.

Volkswagen targetted to have 550,000 in total car market and target market raise 100,000 (1.8%) in Singapore. The Golf is a claim to fame great that require high inclusion in the buy choice. The procedure takes into consideration the most elevated level of authority over other appropriation techniques. This gives chances to concentrate on submitted and concentrated individual selling, joined with broad after-sales administration to keep up the selective nature of the Golf.

Volkswagen makes more prominent intrigue towards the Golf as needs be to the psychographic profile of the objective market who esteems trusted and recognizable brands. Moreover, they are going to change client essential such as present more eco-friendly models are likewise numerous fewer outflows of carbon dioxide in every single car brand, to meet new client needs (green vehicle), and upgrade the brand notoriety (Strategic Management Insight, 2012).

The Golf will be supported for explicit occasion that have the pertinent properties that make a direction toward an energetic picture such occasions recognized incorporate F1 and Singapore Motor show. Advertising (PR) would be utilized to produce exposure and impart brand esteems. These will build up the Golf towards the ideal market situating while assembling great associations with the market. This is significant in reducing the effect of the current negative picture related to Volkswagen.

Despite the fact that that sounds excellent, it isn’t adequate to accomplish their objectives put in a safe spot for 2018 (Volkswagen 2011e). Over the long haul, Volkswagen expects to build unit deals to in excess of 10 million vehicles per year, catch a better than expected offer as the significant development markets create and increment its arrival on deals before duty to in any event 8% so as to keep up its strong money related position in any event, during troublesome market periods (Volkswagen 2011h).

Conclusion

Volkswagen has taken the steps to move with time from their distinguished past as war vehicle makers to world-class vehicle creator that has gained notoriety for quality and extravagance vehicles particularly the ‘Golf’ and Volkswagen has always remembered what its spirit design was: to be the ‘people’s car’. The company’s capacity to re-develop itself to alter to purchasers’ needs in each degree of the general public has kept them pertinent to the car business.

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