Snap Inc. Stakeholder Analysis & Strategy Essay.

Stakeholders of Snapchat

Snap Inc. refers to a media company considering reinvention the use of the camera. Evan Spiegel is the co-founder and CEO of the company along with Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown developed the multimedia application Snapchat in 2011. The mission and vision of the company are to provide an opportunity to the people to improve their style of living and communicating. The purpose of this report is to explore the key stakeholders of the company and analyse their significance for the organisation.

According to available reports and statements of snapchat by Allen (2017), it is found that there is the huge base of stakeholders of the company that includes the company officers, directors, communities, committees, employees, investors, shareholders, government, customers and related corporates.

Officers:

The executive officers like Evan Spiegel, Robert Murphy, Imran Khan, Michael O’Sullivan, Tim Stone, Lara Sweet and Jerry Hunter had been providing their immense effort and contribution to the company by taking to another level of social media networking and stratifying the trendy styles of generation (Snap Inc., 2018). The founders being student had formed and developed this application to enhance the use and productivity of smartphones and cameras. The strategy makers have come up from different industrial sectors to share their valuable thoughts and develop the products of snapchat to attract as many as the community. Therefore, the significance of a proper organisational structure is inevitable.

Independent directors:

Directors like Michael Lynton, Joanna Coles, A.G. Lafley, Stanley Meresman, Scott D. Miller, Poppy Thorpe and Christopher Young had been the members of board of directors of the company as well as well-established positions of the marketing who have served the best of their efforts for the company in directing the business model of the company for so long and making it interesting with its new products (Snap Inc., 2018).

Communities:

The group of communities refer to the users of Snapchat from all over the world. These are taken to be one of the most important stakeholders because it is for them that the application has been developed to renovate the lifestyle practices and social trends. The interrelated stakeholders of communities can be referred to the multimedia associates like Facebook, Google, Twitter, Instagram, Microsoft, etc. that fetch the users of Snapchat (Richards, 2014).

Committees:

These group of stakeholders refer to the different corporate communities that have taken in charge to make an effort and contribution in developing the business and operational strategies of the company (Anderson, 2015).

Stakeholder Analysis for Four Selected Stakeholder Groups

Employees:

Employees are important stakeholders because they help in formulating different products of the company and deal with the users all over the world.

Investors:

The role of investors or shareholders is immense that gains the popularity and high esteem of the company. According to the recent reports, Snapchat holds almost the maximum number of netizens as its user. Thus, the share of the market is strong enough for the company to operate their functions with the introduction of new tools and products every other day (Snap Inc., 2018).

Government:

The intervention of the government and policies is mainly emphasized on the cyber section that states the policies of using cyber laws and maintaining technological decorum.

Multimedia associates:

The multimedia associates like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. are the most supportive brands that help to develop the application 

Stakeholder analysis is a process where the objective, strength, opportunity and threats of the company get clear. There are four parts of the stakeholder’s analysis, and those four parts are the categories where each stakeholder can be placed as per their capabilities, and those foreparts are as follows:

These are the four parts which are involved in the analysis of the stakeholders. These four parts have their unique feature and give the detail information of the bodies performance and motives. These help the company to understand the market and build the new strategy to sustain the business (Eskerod et al. 2015). In Snapchat these four parts have an important role because snapchat is a largest and popular inline application in all over the world thus these play an active role in their business. The four parts are going to explain:

Swing:

In this group, the leader and the higher authority of the company are involved because the leader of the company uses to take all the decisions the company or bring new technology for improving the product quality and service. According to Macarthy (2018), the leader of the snapshot plays key role during the time of the decision-making process became the leader must think the new technology where they can go ahead of any company, and the customer should get the best service, apart from these all the staff of the company should be flexible to adopt the new technology or the decision. If some of the employees are failing to perform the job, then those employees will get special training to understand the new working structure. Along with this, the employee will get an opportunity to enhance their working skill which will help them in their daily life, and this will also help them to increase the operational efficiency of the company.

Stakeholder Category Identification and Generic Strategic Programs for Each of the Four Selected Stakeholders

Offensive strategy:  

In this category thee critics, internal employees or the customers/users are very active. This is because it is not possible by the company to satisfy all their customer or stop their haters from hating. In that case, the unsatisfied customer uses to exploit the reputation of the company by giving the poor review of their service. Many experts are also in this activity for promoting their brand by exploiting the image of the company (Weiss, 2014). Many former employees and the current employee who are not satisfied with the current system of the company they also take part in this activity. This is one of the biggest threats for the company.

Defensive strategy:

The moderators, leader and promoters are in this group. According to Doh and Quigley (2014), the role of the leader is to look after the service and the strategy where it is comfortable for the customer, employees and they should not comment any which can affect the company in a negative term. Previously the former CEO of the company has commented that snapchat is only for rich people and the rich country it is not for the developing countries like Spain and India it is because the company did not get any investors from these two countries. Thus, this dropped around 1.5% share of the company in the market (Smith, 2016). People, especially in India, restricted themselves from using snapchat that lead them a movement with hashtag uninstall snapchat, and this has affected the company very badly. After a few days, the company authoritative taken back their words and said that snapchat is for everyone and there is no discrimination against users. Thus, this very incident is remarkable as one of the defensive acts of the company. At that very moment, the social media and promoters started to promote the brand to reach more people and gain more users worldwide.

Hold strategy:

The board of directors has the authority to hold the situation because they are the only person to understand the current situation of the company. If the current situation of the company is going well then, they will continue to with their strategy, and if the situation deteriorates, then they will hold the new strategy or the current change (Carroll and Buchholtz, 2014).

There are four types of stakeholders which as it has been mention previously. The generic strategic programme will analyse the capacity of the stakeholders and will find the threat in corporate sectors. This will also help the company to understand the effectiveness of the stakeholders and their activity. The activities of the stakeholders are given below:

Stakeholder type 4              Leaders and the administrators                        Mixed blessing                     Strategy: collaborate	Stakeholder type 1       Moderators, leader and the promoters                            Supportive                         Strategy: involve
Stakeholder type 3 Critics and users Non-supportive Strategy: defend	Stakeholder type 2                      Board of directors                             Marginal                       Strategy: monitor

Type 1 Stakeholder:

The leader, moderators and the promoters of the company are very cooperative and support the organisation for its betterment. They are not the potential threats because they are the bodies which are cooperative. They are the body which protects or defend the company from any kind threats or exploitation. They are very much supportive because the leader of the organisation will always take the decision in favour of the company to develop the structure (Billings et al. 2017). Therefore, in this category, the company will also follow the rules and regulation of the government to sustain their business in that country.

Type 2 stakeholders:

The board of directors are the type 2 stakeholders because they are the body which is less known for their threat and they are known for their involvement in the company.

Type 3 stakeholders:

Critics and the user are the non-supportive groups because and they are the type 3 stakeholders. The critics exploit the companies’ image and their reputation or some time beaching code of conduct (Grieve, 2017). It is because all the user of the company cannot be satisfied and thus they like to exploit the company by giving negative feedback.

Type 4 stakeholders:

The leader and the administrator are in this group because the adminitrat0r and the leader are the key factors for snapchat to create the new strategy for developing their service and reach the new customer. According to Smith (2017), the leader of the snapchat has currently expressed their views upon their users that snap chat is becoming one of the popular platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp, the company needs a new investor in new countries where they are providing their service, but countries like India and Spain has refused to provide investor. After this, snapchat experienced big loss forms their users who are from India and Spain. Later the new leader claimed that snapchat is for all of the countries and it will provide service to unreachable areas of the world.

The favourable strategies available for each of the stakeholder group are as follows:

In case of making swing strategies, the stakeholders of Snapchat are about to change the kind of decisions they make to prefer walking in alignment with the formal rules and regulations. This can be done by restructuring the resources for creating new business units just like the new products of the application. The taskforces should be in alignment with the high-level support and that act as a cooperative character and not a threat.

The defensive strategies reinforce the organisational beliefs and maintain the current programming that initiates a smooth process of the transaction for the stakeholders, and they can equally enjoy shared values, incentives and participate in making forward the commitments of the organisation. Defensive strategies are not considered to be any risk, and a cooperative approach can help in developing an implementation of this force.

As per Andrews and Shimp (2017), offensive strategies are upside potential that creates to be a risk factor in changing the current belief of the organisation or trying to shake the objectives of the stakeholder by adopting approaches to public relations, explicit and implicit negotiation or by ignoring the stakeholders. The interaction must be in favour of judging neutrality that is often not achieved in this section. Therefore, it is a risk.

Hold strategies are at the neutral position that monitors the existing program of the organisation and tries to reinforce the prevailing perspective of the organisation. Snapchat is focusing on guarding the transactional processes by creating an implementation control over the strategic programs, strategic directions and controlling the factors in favour of hold evaluation. This factor is neither risk nor a cooperative, but the characteristic depends on the adaptability of the situation.

Conclusion:

The purpose of this report was to highlight the significance of stakeholders of a multimedia company named Snapchat and make a vivid analysis of stakeholder strategies. Addressing the requirement of the report, the stakeholder analysis is done and makes some relevant recommendations to follow on.

Reference list: 

Allen, R., 2017. SnapChat marketing statistics.

Anderson, K.E., 2015. Getting acquainted with social networks and apps: Snapchat and the rise of ephemeral communication. Library Hi Tech News, 32(10), pp.6-10.

Andrews, J.C. and Shimp, T.A., 2017. Advertising, promotion, and other aspects of integrated marketing communications. Nelson Education.

Billings, A.C., Qiao, F., Conlin, L. and Nie, T., 2017. Permanently desiring the temporary? Snapchat, social media, and the shifting motivations of sports fans. Communication & Sport, 5(1), pp.10-26.

Carroll, A. and Buchholtz, A., 2014. Business and Society: Ethics, sustainability, and stakeholder management. Nelson Education.

Doh, J.P. and Quigley, N.R., 2014. Responsible leadership and stakeholder management: Influence pathways and organizational outcomes. Academy of Management Perspectives, 28(3), pp.255-274.

Eskerod, P., Huemann, M. and Savage, G., 2015. Project stakeholder management—Past and present. Project Management Journal, 46(6), pp.6-14.

Freeman, R.E., 1984. Strategic management: A stakeholder perspective. Boston: Pitman, p.13.

Grieve, R., 2017. Unpacking the characteristics of Snapchat users: A preliminary investigation and an agenda for future research. Computers in Human Behavior, 74, pp.130-138.

Macarthy, A., 2018. 500 Social Media Marketing Tips: Essential Advice, Hints and Strategy for Business Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and More!. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.

Richards, M., 2014. Social media: Dominating strategies for social media marketing with Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Linkedin and Instagram. Michael Richards.

Smith, C., 2016. By the Numbers: 80 Amazing Snapchat Statistics. DMR Stats/Gadgets. Retrieved June, 21, p.2016.

Smith, C., 2017. 135 Amazing Snapchat statistics and Facts. Retrieved, 9(12), p.2017.

Snap Inc., 2018, Company Profile, viewed 23 August 2018, https://investor.snap.com/company-profile

Snap Inc., 2018, Corporate Governance, viewed 23 August 2018, https://investor.snap.com/corporate-governance/officers-and-directors/executive-officers

Snap Inc., 2018, Events & Presentations, viewed 23 August 2018, https://investor.snap.com/events-and-presentations/presentations/2018

Weiss, J.W., 2014. Business ethics: A stakeholder and issues management approach. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.