Ideal Digital Marketing Strategy: Analytical Essay

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.

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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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