Leo Burnett Case Study Essay Example
Leo Burnett Case Study Essay Example

Leo Burnett Case Study Essay Example

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  • Pages: 11 (2815 words)
  • Published: January 22, 2017
  • Type: Essay
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Globalisation has led to many changes in the international marketing and global advertising industry. Many international companies have projects spanning a variety of nationalities, involving great geographical distances and a range of time zones. In this scenario, companies are forced to make virtual teams - which are comprised of members who are located in more than one physical location (Peters and Manz, 2007). This virtual team trait has fostered extensive use of a variety of forms of computer-mediated communication that enable geographically dispersed members to coordinate their individual effort and inputs (Attaran, 2002).

In addition, commitment to a virtual team goal may be further complicated by the single or coherent line of authority if the members call from different profit and loss centres within an organisation or different organisations altogether (Bergiel at el. 20

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08). The need for a global mindset and technological expertise become critical for the success of virtual teams. Here we will be discussing the case study of the Leo Burnett global advertising company, which faced difficulties in managing their virtual team for the launch of their client OBC’s global product in the Taiwan and Canada markets. Assume the role of an LB employee

What is your everyday environment like (assume this would be normally involve face-to-face teams)?

Specifically, consider how you would fill your day, what the office environment would be, what would determine your work priorities and the nature of your relationship with your colleagues and your client(s) Leo Burnett is a global advertising agency and offered its clients a wide range of marketing and communications services and products. Employees are working as multidisciplinary face t

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face [virtually] teams to perform client’s requirements.

As a full service agency, employees are interdependent and formed separate for each client’s brands. At any given time each of the team members could be part of more than two or three brand teams due to busy schedules in their working hours. Due to global operations, the correspondence from the other LB global office or client’s office may come in deferred [due to time difference geographically] working hours, which may result in employees working up to 60 hours per week. Most of the employees are young and they would prioritise their work according to client’s needs and project deadlines. The projects are time framed, which means employees ork under high pressure and calls for high quality planning. As Curseu et al (2008) said, LB’s teams also use sophisticated technologies for communicating with each other, including video conferencing, Internet and intranet and collaborative software.

The company’s horizontal structure is designed to facilitate client’s needs at different locations (globally) and this is achieved by coordination between teams and technologies within the organisation. As a part of LB’s virtual team, employees are highly responsible for meeting the requirements of their core and peripheral responsibilities. Their core esponsibilities are their project assignments, which are specialised for each brand. Their peripheral responsibilities are the coordination of the other brand activities as they are part of more than two or three brands at any given time. Employees report to the home department supervisor formally, and informally to the project team leader if they are part of a particular project team. Most of the employees have two type of reporting lines. Employee

performance is evaluated by the formal and informal reporting line heads and decisions are made accordingly for assigning and managing the work load.

The face-toface teams are usually built on trust and familiarity between individuals, strengthened by socialising together after long office hours. (Exhibit 1) b) How is this different from your role as part of the Forever Young virtual team? As a part of LB’s new assignment with their major client OBC, employees from different teams were assigned to the Forever Young project. OBC’s plan was to launch their new global product at different global locations and thus LB made their team specifically from Taipei and Toronto locations, which was set apart from their London global office.

The teams at Taipei and Toronto were assigned to meet the local geographical project requirement and can be termed as satellite, non face-to-face [virtual] teams. The role of the Forever Young virtual teams was slightly different from those teams working in the London corporate office. The working environment and communication between the London face-to-face teams would be much stronger than that between the satellite and corporate office, due to restrictions in communicating meaning using systems like email and ICTs..

In order to ensure effective communication between satellite and global office virtual teams, as suggested by Morris (2008), modern information and communication technologies were widely used, such as video conferencing, Internet and intranet. The challenge for the Forever Young virtual team was to change the global template designed at the London office according to the requirements of the local market localisation strategy.

This differentiated their role from other teams in the agency, and the

expertise required for managing the sophisticated communication technologies as a replacement of face-to-face communication and global mind set are thus vital for virtual team success (Kirkman et al. 2002). Also, the product is new and improved decision quality and decision speed are critical for virtual team success (Badrinarayanan and Arnett, 2008). Trust between virtual teams plays a vital role in effective communication and thus the time keeping in commitments become crucial for the success within the project’s time frame. ) What are some of the difficulties that the Forever Young global advertising and communication team faced throughout the launch process? To what do you attribute these difficulties? The mission of the Forever Young global team was to prepare for OBC’s successful new product launch in the markets of Taiwan (Taipei) and Canada (Toronto). The two satellite teams were created by LB for this purpose and centralised their control at the global office at London. The London global office supplied the global template creative and satellite teams were required to localise their materials with the same context of global template.

The Taipei virtual teams made all the materials including traditional and non-traditional products and communicated frequently with their London global office. The coordination of the Taipei and London teams was commendable and succeeded in making the launch a big triumph and made a success of the virtual team. The story was different for the Toronto team. In principle; LB had decided to make the traditional advertising materials (TV and print advertisement) in the London office and the non-traditional material in the Toronto office.

The division of work for the same project within the teams

– especially for virtual teams - made the task really complex and the need for synthesising both teams’ ideas for similarity [global template vs. local creative] made the situation worse. At the start the team leader (Carmichael) of both teams had the responsibility of making communications clear between the two teams, and also had to find time to bring the group together for a face-to-face meeting. When the time came, the virtual teams started communicating with each other mainly through videoconferencing and emails.

This led to difficulties for both teams as their communications often ended up with lack of clarity, leading to misjudgements. Initially the Toronto team did not have confidence in the creative (TV advertisement with blond, Caucasian actress) provided by the London global team, and this made them lose confidence in the initial stages. LB’s team managing was not impressive and due to lack of confidence in the existing communication protocol, Toronto team leaders were trying to bypass their communication and go directly to the global team leader.

The global virtual team and all the senior officers in the project teams were sitting in the London office and the effective face-to-face communication with global leaders gave the global virtual team more confidence. The Toronto team was under pressure to change their creative according to global teams to get approval from the global office. This led to disappointment in the Toronto team and showed a lack of confidence in their work. The major challenge was seen at the time of web site designing. The OBC’s standard required for the web site design was beyond LB’s expectation and this lead to creative problems

in the designing stage.

The non-availability of digital expertise and inconsistent instructions from OBC’s London and Toronto offices made the scenario worse. The frequent modification of web site design and changes in the creative before the launch lead to overspend on the project budget, and this called for LB’s unnecessary negotiation with OBC, which was unusual. The pre-launch test results from the Canadian market and US markets were contradictory in nature and the Toronto and London teams were required to revise their materials again under a tight time frame before the national launch.

The awareness level of the Canadian market [global mindset] for LB’s global team was not clear and they were reluctant to make any major changes in their traditional advertising materials. This became a problem when adapting localisation strategy for the Toronto team for their non-traditional advertising materials. It was mentioned in the research result that the Canadian market is sensitive to the advertising elements and would perceive some of the advertising elements as “violent” (pp11).

This is a clear indication of the need for thorough local knowledge to avoid such unexpected things in the globally standardised traditional materials. As a result, LB’s strategy of mixing globally standardised and localised advertising materials for the same product travelled in different direction and ended up in a failure for the overall launch process. 4) As Janet Carmichael, do you now decentralise the team? Why or Why not? The milieu of this question leads to the debate of the success and failure of the two teams, who were within the same organisation and worked for same client.

What made them different and

led to the success of one team and failure of the other team is the critical criteria needing to be analysed before deciding whether to decentralise the team or not. The Taipei team had full autonomy to decide what they needed to do for their market, apart from the final approval for their decisions. Why did LB’s global management approve this? Because LB’s team were not aware of the Asian market and their culture. The Taipei team effectively used their autonomy and formed their local team with local participation.

They realised the need to explore the market with local knowledge and participation. These made them successful in their ways and finally ended up with a big victory in their entire launch process. Things were different for the Toronto team, and we need to find this answer in this context. The LB’s senior team decided to divide the task into traditional and non traditional aspects of advertising materials. Why did LB management only divide the task for the Toronto team? They may have thought that the Canadian market and European markets are virtually same.

As Gupta and Govindarajan (2002) points out, success of the virtual team relies upon the openness to synthesis the diversity across cultures. As a team leader, Carmichael was supposed to be the person responsible for designing the strategy according to the market requirement. Though she is a Canadian, her native experience influenced her decision making without thinking about cultural change over time [lack of global mind set]. Prasad and Akhilesh (2002) said that strategic objectives play vital roles in the design and performance of virtual teams. Though the major control

and influence was eld by the London team, the Toronto team failed to make their opinions for the changes required according to the localisation strategy instead of globally standardised materials in their market. Moreover, their technology incompetence and inability to operate ICTs resulted in a loss of mutual trust and confidence. Things were not easy for Carmichael because of the complex nature of decentralising the teams. The major stress for her is to retain OBC as a client by making the launch successful, and to complete the project as soon as possible to avoid further revenue loss to the company.

The recent changes in both of the teams forced her into a real dilemma. The decision is mainly dependant upon the research result of recently presented new creative concepts by the Toronto teams. If the team managed to make a creative that is suitable for their market and research findings were positive, she will be under pressure to decentralise the teams or give them more autonomy. If the teams decentralised then the entire control of the Toronto team would be in trouble because of the lack of expertise available there to lead the brand and team.

In this current scenario, the ideal situation would be to give more autonomy to the Toronto team (to improve team dynamics) for direct and indirect advertising materials, with final decision making sealed with the global team at London. This would help to add value to the entire process. It is necessary to put somebody in the communication protocol channel who has a good global mindset probably the global creative director (the Toronto team already had confidence in

her) or similar to support the both teams accordingly.

By taking this decision, the team in Toronto will be happy with the autonomy given to them and the team in London would also be happy with the ultimate decision making power. Without splitting the team, she can manage goodwill with OBC as well. Simultaneously, she needs to train her virtual teams to become competent with the operation of the sophisticated technology used for communication within the teams, and needs to enhance the global mindset of the team by shuffling the team members, either by putting them in different culture brand activities or diversified markets.

Exhibit

What challenges, do you think, face the international advertising industry given the current economic environment? Like all industries, advertising will reflect the current economic slowdown. In the present scenario, marketing and advertising budgets are often the first to be under scrutiny. Chris, 2007, states that it is vital to keep advertising in a recession to retain market share but he finds that advertising is usually the first to be cut. He also mentioned that the cost cut is mainly for TV and print materials.

However, the clients will still need to advertise and communicate in order to build on brand equity and maintain the share of noise levels, creating a tough situation that calls for smart campaigns and effective media solutions for the international marketing industry. Advertising companies that provide quantifiable return on investments (ROI) for the clients through their creative will be highly valued. Newborn (2002) points out that during recession, placing advertisements in search engines would be an alternative way to meet the cost.

style="text-align: justify;">This would mean the advertising industry needing to be shaped to place digital marketing at the forefront. Market research capabilities of advertising firms are become critical in the recession time. Marks (1992) points out that marketing research competence of advertising companies is vital to adapt advertising strategy efficiently in the tough times. Koksal and Ozgul (2007) makes it clear that companies that modify their strategies appropriately can maintain or improve their performance in the time of crisis.

Economic recession forced international companies to focus more on emerging markets like Asian countries (China and India). As a result of that, recession would become a big challenge for the international advertising companies to start operating either from the new markets or through the virtual teams. The need for creating a global mind set (Gupta and Govindarajan, 2002) and effective training for using sophisticated communication technologies (Lepak and Snell, 1998) called for huge investments in the near future. Companies that are financially sound and strategically competent will exist and others would become outdated.

People in organisations have known for a long time that trust is an important antecedent of effective teamwork. So it would make sense for this to hold true not only in face to face groups, but also for virtual teams. Research suggests that trust in virtual teams depends largely upon reliability. When virtual team members feel they can count on one another to do what they say they will do, trust builds quickly. Team leaders play a vital role building trust in virtual teams (Oertig and Buergi 2006). Leaders have to create opportunities for social interaction, since they don’t happen when team

members are dispersed.

Providing opportunities for team members to get to know one another, – both for their work-related skills and their personal interests, should be included (Pauleen, 2003). Since this scenario provides great potential for misunderstanding, virtual team leaders and senior members within the organisation need to be vigilant regarding the entire virtual team communication and corrections at the initial stages are therefore important. In an international business arena, creating global mindsets within organisations and making sure teams are able competent to use with ICTs are the mantras for “think global and act local”.

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