Strategies For Enhancing Internal Communication And Company-Consumer Relationship

Discuss About The Internal Communication Strategy Into Action?

The Lego group is a Danish company best known for manufacturing Lego-brand toys which are mostly comprises of construction of various structure by interlocking plastic bricks. Apart from manufacturing Lego-Brand toys, the company has also built good number of amusement parks popularly known as Legoland along with operating a numerous retail source. However, in 2003 the company was almost losing its existence due to lack of money. This situation was controlled by the founder family within 12 years, but the company has still not gained its former position and is again suffering from the business cycle which it had experienced in 2003. The two crucial issues faced by the company are complexity due to multi-layered managerial system and lack of consumer-company relationship. This report consists of several interventions to solve the two above mentioned issues. In order to eradicate the issues due to overloaded managerial system, several strategies like eliminating the unnecessary middle management post, enhancement of internal communication are suggested. A good number of interventions are suggested in order to enhance the consumer-company relationship (Bryson 2018). Finally, it has been concluded that by efficiently implementing the mentioned interventions the company will be able to regain its popularity among its consumers.

Considering the fact that The Lego Group is suffering from large organizational complexity, some of the major disadvantages faced by the company are slow decision making, communication issues, Inflexible and rigid organizational structure and expensive management. Overloaded managerial system in The Lego Group has given birth to another core issue of the company, that is, weak company-consumer relationship. Inadequate research on the requirements of global consumers has led to huge loss of the company. The following discussions have been mentioned below.

The Lego group has a large number of managers and hence the managerial system of the company in highly expensive. This imposes negative impact on the overall yearly revenue of the company. A multilayered managerial system may provide effective leadership for the prosperity of an organization (Jolibert et al. 2012).  However, in case of The Lego group, overloaded management system is creating complexity which in turn, is giving birth huge decrement in the revenue of the company. One of the most common money saving move to decrease the expanses of the management is laying off the middle managerial posts. This will not only reduce the overall expanses of the Lego Group, but also reduce the complexity of its managerial system.

Interventions related to large organizational complexity

Considering the fact that clear, timely and uninterrupted communication is the core of an efficient organization, the shorter the distance between the receiver and the sender, the more effective and clearer will be the communication. Multilayer managerial system not only bears the risk of message distortion but also slows down the communication. Hence companies like Lego should focus on developing internal communication between employees (Quirke 2012). Popular organizations like Cyclops, Global creatures and Apple Co. have taken the help of internet to enhance their internal communication, which in turn has imposed highly positive impact on their productivity.

Rigid and inflexible organizational structure is another disadvantage of Multi-layer managerial system. According to ‘Strategically Management in Public and Nonprofit organization’, excessive rigidity and inflexibility hinders the growth of an organization by delaying useful decision (Bryson 2018). Not only this, inflexible administration also creates employee retention issues. Considering the fact that The Lego Group is suffering from all these above mentioned issues, the company should immediately change its management strategies and involve strategies that are more flexible.

Another major issue faced by the Lego Group due to its multiple-layered management system is slow decision making. The quicker an organization can make decision, the quicker will be the results and the whole process enhances the efficiency of an Organization (Pettigrew 2014). In multi-level managerial system, it has been found that the necessary information which needs to reach the highest level managers, takes a considerable amount of time in reaching them and coming back from them. In order to eradicate this problem, the Lego group needs to concentrate on various technologies and tool that can efficiently speed up the process of decision making. Some of the tools used by popular organizations are T-Charts, Decision Matrix, Decision tree, SWOT and PEST Analysis and Pareto Analysis.

As a result of multi-layered management system, the Lego Group is facing issues in maintaining a healthy company-consumer relationship. In spite of manufacturing high quality products, the company is suffering from loss in both European and US markets due to lack of research on the requirements of the consumers. Business.qld.gov.au states that, the first step that should be taken by any organization to cope up with the above mentioned issue is to its consumer on the basis of age, gender, occupation and recreational activities. The second step will be to identify the preferable shopping method of their targeted market and the final step involves consideration of the marketing habits of the consumers.

Ways to developing a better company-consumer relationship

 According to Davenport, DalleMule and Lucker (2011), in today’s world of internet, consumers have lots of information and options to choose from. Hence organizations with poorly informed and shorthanded management system often fail to compete in this highly competitive market. However, this situation can be overcome with the help of advanced information technologies, analytics and data gathering. Various organizations are able to create highly customized products due to the usage of increasingly granular data ranging from detailed psychographics and demographics to customer’s click streams on the web. Success stories of popular organizations like Microsoft can be considered here. The emails offers by Microsoft are tailored to the consumers at the moment they are opened (Kang 2013). In 200 milliseconds, advanced analytics software assembles an offer based on all the data associated with the consumers like age, gender, online activities including both current and historical proceedings. This strategy is popularly known as the ‘Next Best Offer’.

However, it has been found that NBOs are often executed poorly leading to utter dissatisfaction of the consumers (Winston and Cahill 2012). Many organizations failed in executing proper NBOs simply because they lack clear objective. Hence in order to develop a proper company-consumer relationship, the Lego Group needs to have clear objective of achieving customer loyalty, increased revenue and new consumers. For example, Tesco, an UK based retailer, has focused its NBO strategies on enhancing consumer loyalty as well as yearly revenue by targeted coupon offers delivered through Clubcard program. This strategy of Tesco has enabled the company to adjust products for local taste along with customizing offerings across a variety of store formats from neighborhood shops to hyper markets.

According to Lindgreen et al. (2012), a good number of suppliers have developed Consumer value models that are data driven representations, in order to gain marketplace advantages over the weak consumers. The above mentioned model is based on analysis of the benefits and costs of a given market offering in a particular consumer application. The first step to form a Consumer value model involves fields value assessment. This assessment involves suppliers to collect data about consumers first hand whenever possible. In cases where field value assessment is not possible, companies tends execute other strategies like direct or indirect surveys, focus groups and conjoint analysis (Holliman and Rowley 2014). The Lego group can also create an efficient Consumer value model in order know the requirements of the consumers and create product according to their requirements

The above discussion has shed light on various intervention theories that can effectively help the Lego group to overcome the issues currently faced by the company. Some of the recommendations that can be suggested to the company to overcome its overloaded managerial issues are:

1. The company should remove unnecessary managerial posts to eradicate overloaded managerial issues.
2. In order to improve internal communication, the company needs to focus on usage of social media. Effective internal communication will not only ensure rapid decision making but will also speed up communication between the employees and managers (Huang, Baptista and Galliers 2013).
3. The management of the company needs to be less rigid and flexible enough to cope up with the rapidly changing toy market.
4. In order to develop an effective company-consumer relationship, the company needs to interact with the consumers through various social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and integral. This will help the company to promote itself and build consumer loyalty.
5. In order to understand the requirements of the consumers the company needs to identify its target consumers along with their recreational activities. Secondly, it needs to identify their preferred shopping methods which can be online shopping, over the phone shopping or offline shopping. Apart from that, The Lego group needs to consider the spending habits of the consumer (Berthon et al. 2012).
6. Finally the company should implement popular practices like the NBO and ‘Consumer Value Model’.

Conclusion

From the above report it can be concluded that the Lego Group needs to implement effective strategies to cope up with the competitive toy market. Due to overloaded managerial system, the company has lost its relevance in the current global market. Complex multi-layered managerial system has resulted in lack of research for consumer requirement. Thus the company is suffering from losses and losing its consumer loyalty. In order to help the company to design effective intervention for these issues the above discussion consists of various strategies to eliminate complexity due to multilayered organizational system and regaining consumer loyalty. 

Reference

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Davenport, T., DalleMule, L. and Lucker, J. (2011). Know What Your Customers Want Before They Do. [online] Harvard Business Review. Available at: https://hbr.org/2011/12/know-what-your-customers-want-before-they-do [Accessed 20 Jan. 2018].

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