Graduate Management Admission Council . Business 3.0 Conference
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This talk delivered at the Intetnational GMAC Conference to Deans and heads of admission of MBA schools around the world seeks to examine what they can learn from brands across other industries. With MBA schools coping with declining admissions, strong overseas competition, disruption from MOOCs ( Massive Open Online Courses) and image parity across schools , there seems a dire need to disrupt and current model and embrace change with agility
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Graduate Management Admission Council . Business 3.0 Conference
- 1. BUILDING GLOBAL BRANDS WITH PURPOSE MEANING AND VALUE @Jayantmurty , jayant.murty@intel.com
- 3. “If we took the mission statements of 100 large industrial companies, mixed them up while everyone was asleep, and reassigned them at random, would anyone wake up tomorrow and cry, ‘My gosh, where has our mission statement gone” ? - Hamel and Prahalad
- 6. How hard is it really? 4300 2100 950 575 13 % 7% 0.25 %
- 7. And how fair is it ? ( Not my opinion) “ You are not getting in from the local bakery or real estate office” “Only accepts those who have already been successful” “ If you are from a state school or a no name company there is no chance” “ One in 5 from JP, MS, McK, GS, BCG” “ No one chosen from big feeder schools ASU, Penn State, Ohio & Michigan state” “ Only selects people who have already been successful”
- 8. Raises a few questions 1. Algorithm of supply? 2. Algorithm of Demand? 3. Luxury or Mass Market? 4. Segmented or Hyper segmented? 5. Manage vs. Reinvent? 6. Navigate vs. Disrupt?
- 9. “Anything invented before you were 18 has been there forever. Anything that turns up before you're 30 is new and exciting. Anything after that is a threat to the world and must be destroyed.” Douglas Adams / How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet
- 12. From the short …..to the long tail
- 14. Music, Movies, Software patches, education ..
- 17. When digital technology meets human generosity
- 18. Innovation from the middle : survival instincts Flexible : Full time , Part time, Distance MBA Future Proof : Circular MBA Specialist Masters : Trading desks , Finance MSc Collaboration Professional InstitutesEmployee Relations Institute Overseas Partnerships : Programs in higrowth markets
- 20. IF YOU HAVE A BODY YOU ARE AN ATHLETE THE WORLD IS MADE BETTER BY CREATING AND SHARING HAPPINESS ORGANIZE THE WORLD INFORMATION TO SERVE EVERY PERSON ON EARTH IT TAKES THE IRREVERNT NON CONFORMISTS TO CHANGE THE WORLD IN A SUPERFICIAL WORLD ITS WHAT’S INSIDE THAT REALLY MATTERS
- 21. Drivers of effective global brands 1. Universal Truth 2. Purposeful positioning 3. Have an enemy
- 22. 1. Markets are Conversations 2. Be Remarkable 3. Fear consumers not competitors 4. Differentiate . Differentiate . Differentiate 5. Exploit the paradox of choice
- 25. Consumers drive the agenda
- 26. Never stop the conversation
- 33. [But] it’s not about creating a mythology around the way a product was created, so it’s no longer “these were cookies made by elves in a hollow tree.” That’s not the value of the brand. The value of the brand is where did this actually come from? What’s in this cookie? Who made it? Are Malaysian children losing their fingers in the cookie press or is this being made by happy cookie culture people? At that point, all these companies come to people like me saying we want to become transparent
- 34. Brands on a continuum: Different Schools of thought Brand Centric Visionary Leadership Long Term Planning 1 strategy for all 1 campaign everywhere Consumer Centric Built in Flexibility Short term responsiveness New strategy everywhere Campaign for every situation
- 40. Reflect relationships, surf cultural waves, local flexibility Girls as equals Respect for women Heroes don’t win - Culturally Iconic - Courageously Creative - Connected Everywhere Gives guys the edge with girls Brain not just brawn
- 46. Know your audience. They are morphing • Your audience is largely youth/ GEN Y ( MBA) • Comprehend what motivates them • Understand how they communicate with each other • Figure out the best way to reach them? • Assess what they value and what they don’t
- 47. Gen Y is different:Needs deep internalization Reject rules Rewrite rules Self Esteem Web esteem Just Do it Just Google it Passing notes Retweet Dot com Kickstarter Scrap booking Pinning
- 48. Here’s what matters to them in life and lifestyle Life Balance Social shopping Life hacking No Full price Life tracking Digital identity Social consumption Life Surprise Tech eyed view Non commitment buying Extended youth Social street Cred Venture consumers Life Resume Relationship Debt Pinning Knowledge Debt Entertainment Debt Financial Debt
- 53. In closing : Things to ponder 1. People exchanges / will you bid for them? 2. Freemium model ( ala Google) – Hiring company pays! 3. Highly customized , Seamless modularity 4. Pricing based on Demand / Supply ( not the iTunes 99c/song) 5. Peer to Peer teaching ( reduced cost models) – question pedagogy? 6. Curated Volunteer model ( Peace Corps) 7. Generosity/ slide share/ open source 8. Alumni consulting / Digital surplus/ Capcha or ReCapcha approach 9. 360 degree Social/ Embrace new digital tools/ Loosen up! 10. Embrace crowd power/ Groupon pricing/ Course on Demand
- 54. Thank You
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- I’m enrolled in CS221: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, a graduate- level course taught by Stanford professors Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig.Last fall, the university in the heart of Silicon Valley did something it had never done before: It opened up three classes, including CS221, to anyone with a web connection. Lectures and assignments—the same ones administered in the regular on-campus class—would be posted and auto-graded online each week. Midterms and finals would have strict deadlines. Stanford wouldn’t issue course credit to the non-matriculated students. But at the end of the term, students who completed a course would be awarded an official Statement of Accomplishment.People around the world have gone crazy for this opportunity. Fully two-thirds of my 160,000 classmates live outside the US. There are students in 190 countries—from India and South Korea to New Zealand and the Republic of Azerbaijan. More than 100 volunteers have signed up to translate the lectures into 44 languages, including Bengali. In Iran, where YouTube is blocked, one student cloned the CS221 class website and—with the professors’ permission—began reposting the video files for 1,000 students.Aside from computer-programming AI-heads, my classmates range from junior-high school students and humanities majors to middle-aged middle school science teachers and seventysomething retirees. One student described CS221 as the “online Woodstock of the digital era.” Personally, I signed up to have the experience of taking a Stanford course. Learning about artificial intelligence would be a nice bonus. After all, if I’m ever going to let a self-driving car speed me down a highway at 65 mph, it’ll be comforting to have a basic understanding of what’s behind the wheel.It’s not until the second week of class that I notice a small disclaimer on the AI course website: Prerequisites: A solid understanding of probability and linear algebra will be required.Solid understanding? I majored in English. This makes me a “fuzzy” (what Stanford techies call liberal arts majors behind their backs). And now I’m trying to wrap my head around Bayesian probability, a branch of statistics that in the past 25 years has revolutionized a dozen fields from genomics and robotics to neuroscience. I’m told it all boils down to this formula:P (A|B) = P (B|A) P(A)P (B)Apply this rule to a computational problem and you can make efficient predictions based on otherwise unreliable data. Practical applications, aside from programming autonomous cars, include calculating a woman’s risk of breast cancer, analyzing DNA, and building a better spam filter.That stuff’s all easier said than done. But the basics are actually fairly basic. I manage to score 58 percent on this homework assignment. I may not comprehend every which way to Bucharest. But in five weeks maybe I’ll be ready to tackle a spam filter.Sebastian Thrun stepped onstage at the March 2011 TED conference in Long Beach, California. In a ballroom filled with 1,000 heavyweight thinkers, the roboticist and AI guru offered a peek at his latest project at Google: a charcoal-gray Toyota Prius outfitted with a laser range finder, radar, and cameras. He showed video of the sedan navigating through highway traffic, dodging deer on a pitch-dark road, and even zigzagging down San Francisco’s Lombard Street—all without a human so much as touching the wheel, the gas, or the brake. The applause roared.You’d think that would have been Thrun’s favorite moment at TED. But it wasn’t. Salman Khan also made a presentation that week. The founder of Khan Academy, which Wired profiled last August, told the story of his nearly six-year-old website, which provides more than 2,800 tutorial videos in subjects like science, math, and economics. Khan capped off his talk by emphasizing how he’s growing a “global one-world classroom.” Joining him onstage, Bill Gates called Khan Academy “the future of education.” For Thrun, it was a full-on epiphany. “I was flabbergasted,” he says. “I teach a lot of great students at Stanford. But the entire world is out there.”Even on a campus with 17 Nobel laureates, four Pulitzer Prize winners, and 18 recipients of the National Medal of Science, Thrun has managed to distinguish himself. In 2004, six months after arriving at Palo Alto as an associate professor, he was named director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The next year his team won the Darpa Grand Challenge, a competition to build an autonomous car that can drive itself across the Nevada desert. (Wired wrote about the 132-mile robo-race in 2006.) For Thrun’s achievement, Stanford was awarded a $2 million prize. Today “Stanley,” Thrun’s self-driving Volkswagen Touareg, lives at the Smithsonian. In April 2011, Thrun gave up his tenure at Stanford to head Google X, a lab created to incubate the company’s most ambitious and secretive projects. He was also free to pursue outside ventures.After seeing Khan at TED, Thrun dusted off a PowerPoint presentation he’d put together in 2007. Back then he had begun envisioning a YouTube for education, a for-profit startup that would allow students to discover and take courses from top professors. In a few slides, he’d spelled out the nine essential components of a university education: admissions, lectures, peer interaction, professor interaction, problem-solving, assignments, exams, deadlines, and certification. While Thrun admired MIT’s OpenCourseWare—the university’s decade-old initiative to publish online all of its lectures, syllabi, and homework from 2,100 courses—he thought it relied too heavily on videos of actual classroom lectures. That was tapping just one-ninth of the equation, with a bit of course material thrown in as a bonus.Thrun knew firsthand what it was like to crave superior instruction. When he was a master’s-degree student at the University of Bonn in Germany in the late 1980s, he found his AI professors to be clueless. He spent a lot of time filling in the gaps at the library, but he longed for a more direct connection to experts. Thrun created his PowerPoint presentation because he understood that university education was a system in need of disruption. But it wasn’t until he heard Khan’s talk that he appreciated he could do something about it. He spoke with Peter Norvig, Google’s director of research and his CS221 coprofessor, and they agreed to open up their next class to the entire world. Yes, it was an educational experiment, but Thrun realized that it could also be the first step in turning that old PowerPoint into an actual business.In June he took the next step: cofounding KnowLabs, which he funded with $300,000 of his own money. He pulled in David Stavens, one of Stanley’s cocreators, as CEO; he tapped Stanford robotics researcher Mike Sokolsky to be CTO. They converted Thrun’s guesthouse into a temporary office. Thus ensconced on a scenic hillside on Page Mill Road near Stanford’s campus, the team began planning. They had eight weeks before the fall term started—not unreasonable given the modest scope of the project. Stavens thought they’d get 500 students. Sokolsky hoped for 1,000. Norvig figured they might hit 2,000.Fifty years from now, according to Thrun, there will be only 10 institutions in the whole world that deliver higher education.In late July, Thrun emailed 1,000 members of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, a group that had weathered the AI winter of the 1980s and ’90s only to see the field later revitalized by the likes of Stanley. By the next morning 5,000 students had signed up. A few days later the class had 10,000. That’s when the Stanford administration called. Thrun had neglected to tell them about his plan—he’d had a hunch it might not go over well. The university’s chief complaint: You cannot issue an official certificate of any kind. Over the next few weeks, 15 meetings were held on the matter. Thrun talked to the dean’s office, the registrar, and the university’s legal department. Meanwhile, enrollment in CS221 was ballooning: 14,000, 18,000, and—just two weeks later—58,000.In all those meetings, not one person objected to Thrun’s offering his class online for free. They admired his vision. The administration simply wanted Thrun to drop the assignments and certificate. He refused. Those two components, he argued, were responsible for driving the sign-ups. Someone proposed removing Stanford’s name from the course website altogether. Eventually they reached a compromise: (1) Offer a Statement of Accomplishment, not a certificate, and (2) include a disclaimer stating that the class wouldn’t count toward Stanford credit, a grade, or a degree.Thrun didn’t have time to celebrate. By mid-August, word of his AI class went viral after a write-up in The New York Times. Enrollment skyrocketed past 100,000. KnowLabs’ website had been built to handle 10,000 students. Class was starting in a matter of weeks. “That,” Sokolsky says, “is when I stopped sleeping.”
- Ory Okolloh who was the blogger under her web log called Kenyan Pundit From being a commmentaty of the media lanscape to the Media LandscapeNAIROBI, Kenya — It took all of about 15 minutes on Sunday, after Kenya’s president was declared the winner of a deeply controversial election, for the country to explode.Skip to next paragraphMultimediaSlide Show Kenya Erupts in ViolenceRelatedTimes Topics: KenyaEnlarge This ImageEvelyn Hockstein for The New York TimesIn Kibera, a slum of one million people near Nairobi, thousands burned buses, homes and shops. More Photos »Thousands of young men burst out of Kibera, a shantytown of one million people, waving sticks, smashing shacks, burning tires and hurling stones. Soldiers poured into the streets to fight them. In several cities across Kenya, witnesses said, gangs went house to house, dragging out people of certain tribes and clubbing them to death.“It’s war,” said Hudson Chate, a mechanic here. “Tribal war.”The dubious conclusion of the most fiercely fought election in Kenya’s history has pitched the country toward chaos. The opposition rejected the results and vowed to inaugurate its leader, Raila Odinga, as “the people’s president,” which the government warned would be tantamount to a coup. As the riots spread, the government took the first steps toward martial law on Sunday night and banned all live media broadcasts.Western observers said Kenya’s election commission ignored undeniable evidence of vote rigging to keep the government in power. Now, one of the most developed, stable nations in Africa, which has a powerhouse economy and a billion-dollar-a-year tourism industry, has plunged into intense uncertainty, losing its sheen as an exemplary democracy and quickly descending into tribal bloodletting.With the president, Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu and Mr. Odinga a Luo, the election seems to have tapped into an atavistic vein of tribal tension that always lay beneath the surface in Kenya but until now had not provoked widespread mayhem.The news media blackout made it difficult to assess the level of popular outrage. But it was clear Sunday night that the violence was spreading. In Mathare, a slum in Nairobi, Luo gangs burned more than 100 Kikuyu homes. In Kibera, Kikuyu families loaded their belongings in cars and fled. Almost all the businesses in the country are shut. The only figures in downtown Nairobi, the capital, which is usually choked with traffic, are helmeted soldiers hunched behind plastic shields. Oily black clouds of smoke rose from the slums, smudging out the sun. At least 15 people have been killed.“It’s a sad day for Kenya,” said Michael E. Ranneberger, the American ambassador to Kenya. “My biggest worry now is violence, which, let’s be honest, will be along tribal lines.”Mr. Odinga’s supporters are unleashing their frustrations about the election, which was held on Thursday and initially praised as fair, against people they suspect supported the president, namely Kikuyus. The Odinga camp urged election officials to recount the votes after exposing serious discrepancies between the results announced on the night of the election versus the numbers that were later entered into a national total.It had been predicted that the vote would be close, and the final results had Mr. Kibaki winning by a sliver, 46 percent to 44 percent. But that gap may have included thousands of invalid ballots. The European Union said its observers witnessed election officials in one constituency announce on election night that President Kibaki had won 50,145 votes. On Sunday, the election commission increased those same results to 75,261 votes.“The presidential elections were flawed,” said Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, the chief European observer.Koki Muli, co-chairwoman of the Kenya Election Domestic Observation Forum, said she was in the room on Sunday when the election commission was presented with dozens of suspicious tally sheets — some missing signatures, others missing stamps — and most of them were from the president’s stronghold of central Kenya. In some areas, more people voted for the president than there were registered voters. “I saw this with my own eyes,” she said.Ms. Muli said that 75 of the 210 constituencies — meaning more than one-third of the vote — had serious question marks and that the election chairman initially agreed to investigate. But later on Sunday he changed his mind.Kenya is a close American ally, and a team of Western diplomats, including the American ambassador, tried for hours to persuade election officials to recount the votes. One Western ambassador said they knew that if the dubious results were certified and the president declared the winner based on them, Kenya would plunge into crisis. But the commission would not budge.“The government was determined to hold onto power,” said the ambassador, who did not want to be identified because he said he feared reprisals from the Kenyan government.About 4 p.m., the election commission announced at its temporary headquarters in a downtown conference center that it was ready to declare a winner. The Western ambassadors filed in, looking worn out. Dozens of soldiers lined the walls, some armed with assault rifles and tear gas. Opposition leaders began shouting. The soldiers pounced and the room erupted into chaos, with men in suits fleeing, chairs getting knocked over and the election chairman making a hurried exit, with a crowd chasing him, yelling: “We want justice! Kenya has spoken!”The commission then reconvened — in front of reporters chosen by government officials — and declared Mr. Kibaki the winner, with 4,584,721 votes compared with 4,352,993 for Mr. Odinga — a spread of about 2 percent.There were indeed irregularities, the commissioners said, but it was not their job to deal with them. “The judicial system provides peaceable avenues to address these complaints,” said the chairman, Samuel Kivuitu.The opposition has not indicated if it will contest the results in Kenya’s courts, which are notoriously slow and corrupt. But it announced a swearing-in ceremony for Mr. Odinga on Monday and declare him the “people’s president.”Officials with Mr. Kibaki’s party warned that such a move could bring consequences. “If Raila does this, he will be attempting a coup and he will get what he deserves,” said Ngari Gituku, a spokesman for the Party of National Unity, Mr. Kibaki’s party.Mr. Odinga was jailed in the 1980s for several years for plotting a coup in Kenya and was beaten and tortured.As for the restrictions on the news media, which many journalists said were a severe setback to what had been considered one of the freest presses in the world, Mr. Gituku said: “The only thing the president wants to do is to heal this nation, and the media is not part of that process. The media has been propagating hate.”Mr. Kibaki was sworn in almost immediately after the results were announced. In a surreal scene, as gunfire rattled in the slums, Mr. Kibaki stood serenely with a Bible in his hand. It was as if he were talking about another election.“We have demonstrated to the world we are politically mature,” he said. He called the vote “honest, orderly and credible.”The election did not start out ominously. Kenyans streamed to the polls in record numbers on Thursday. Some waited for hours in lines that were miles long.The contest was seen as a test of Kenya’s young multiparty democracy, with Mr. Kibaki, 76, representing the establishment and Mr. Odinga, 62, a new brand of politics. Mr. Kibaki has been in government since independence in 1963 and was seen by many Kenyans as continuing an unfair political system that has favored the Kikuyu at the expense of Kenya’s 30-plus other ethnic groups. Mr. Odinga, a rich businessman who campaigned as a champion of the poor, added to his popularity by tapping into those frustrations and building a coalition of many tribes.The first batch of results showed a sweeping victory for the opposition, with Mr. Odinga ahead by one million votes on Friday. But that lead evaporated overnight, and by Saturday the race was essentially a tie.But the sudden reversal ignited suspicions, especially after many members of Parliament close to the president were voted out of office in a wave of seeming dissatisfaction with the government. Ms. Muli, the Kenyan election observer, said it was clear the government had rigged the election. “This country has come a long way,” she said. “And now we have been set back many miles.”
- And of course, new business schools are springing up in India and China – attracting a market that would once have gone to the UK and America.Our own business school has seen numbers decline along with our competitors – ironically, just as we achieved the AACSB accreditation, giving us the ‘Triple Crown’ and putting us into the world’s top 58 of business schools.But businesses across the world have faced similar challenges to ours and our teaching helps them to apply transformational strategies, despite recessions and increased competition. So we are now applying our own teaching to ourselves.Here is just a snapshot of what we are doing to ensure we retain our position among the world’s top business schools and deliver for our students and alumni.1. Flexible learning modulesMany of our students are concerned about the long term commitment of an MBA when they can’t be certain of the economy or their plans.Our distance learning MBA has grown significantly and we expect that to continue. We have worked hard over the last two years to ensure that anyone studying an MBA at Bradford can move seamlessly between full time, part time and distance learning MBA.Our modules are also run simultaneously across the world – so students could study strategy in Singapore, finance in UK and HR in Dubai.2. MBAs for the futureCourtesy of yachtpals.comPerhaps our greatest innovation has been to create an MBA with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation to reflect business and business models of the future. The circular economy has become a hot topic, recently mentioned in EU policy documents, and is seen as a way of gaining competitive advantage for organisations and economies. The circular economy MBA has been designed with the likes of Renault, B&Q and National Grid and will appeal to those working in large corporates as much as those wanting innovative digital businesses of the futureToday’s economic conditions, characterised by increased price volatility and scarcity on the energy and resources fronts, require a change in perspective. We believe that an innovative approach, which integrates systems thinking and looks beyond the linear ‘take, make, dispose’ model, is the answer that a forward-looking School of Management should strive to provide. We have designed our circular economy MBA to give the next generation of leaders a first-mover advantage, by tackling subjects including regenerative product design, new business models, reverse logistics and enabling communication technologies.The programme is studied through distance-learning, using a combination of self-study, online teaching and group discussions. This flexibility means that you can fit your learning around your work and home commitments, and complete the MBA at a pace to suit you, in anything from 2 to 6 years3. Specialist MastersThe MBA may not be growing at the same pace as before, but the specialist Masters field definitely is. Earlier this year we launched a trading room for students on specialist finance MScs – where they can practise trading on Thomson Reuters Eikon software as well as gain insights into ethical dilemmas.4. Working with professional institutesLast year we launched a new employee relations postgraduate programme designed with the help of international companies including BP and HSBC.The new course is designed in partnership with the Employee Relations Institute (ERI) and businesses and trade unions such as UNITE have all contributed ideas to make the programme practical and relevant to employers.5. New overseas partnershipsOf course, many businesses have a strategy based on ‘if you can’t beat them, join them (but do it better)’. We are exploring new partnerships for delivering Bradford degree programmes in high growth markets such as China.This is a business school that is practising what it preaches – finding new avenues for new futures.If you were in our seats, where would you focus your efforts for the future – and where do you see the MBA market going?Where do you see future opportunities for our School?- See more at: http://blogs.brad.ac.uk/management/experts/2013/01/can-business-schools-adapt-to-the-challenges-of-declining-mba-numbers/#sthash.Gvt3P7oi.dpuf
- People who never went to school
- Unilever has been plagued by controversies from the two brands it owns: Axe and Dove. Both products are hugely in contrast in their advertising campaigns. Of course, Unilever continues to maintain uniformity among its brands adhering to its ideology, which is dedicated to improving quality of life through the provision of hygienic products and therefore enhancing self-esteem.The question is, is the Dove brand really adhering to its product campaign? Or is it just hypocrisy? Perhaps the reason why Unilever allows Axe to continue its product campaign, in spite of the fact the marketers have seen the vast conflict between its two major brands in terms of getting the company’s message across its consumers, is that Axe manages to bring in more sales. Axe made it big in sixty countries with annual sales of nearly $600 million dollars in the early years of the 21st century. On the other hand, even though Dove’s sales increased by 6% a year after launching their “natural beauty” campaign, succeeding years’ sales has flatlined.Here are some reasons why people find that Axe and Dove have stirred much controversy notwithstanding that they are actually from the same company. The main story can be trimmed down to one thing: the brands’ contradicting advertisements.Amidst the advertising choas, one thing is for sure, it did rouse critics and consumers to speak out their comments, and that is exactly what these brands wanted: to create a buzz and gain attention. Whether that is good advertising or sheer hypocrisy, it all boils down to the sales generated by these two major brands.Target MarketSimply put, it is quite obvious that Axe is for young men and Dove is for women who want to feel good inside and out. The male population is also besieged by physical insecurities and by spraying on Axe, beautiful women would come rushing to them. That’s the Axe brand promise.Self-Esteem Also, even if they are from the same company, you will not likely give it such a huge deal as long as these products can really deliver what they promise in their advertisements. However, in the real sense, the public need not be alarmed that they have contradicting messages. If you will look closely, they both coincide with the mission statement of their mother company, which is to improve their customers’ quality of life in terms of hygiene and self-esteem. There is no question that the Axe and Dove brands’ vision is to provide superiority when it comes to hygiene but there goes the issue on self-esteem.True, each delivers the promise of boosting self-esteem to their specific target market. The Axe brand provides self-esteem to young men who experience social adjustments due to the physiological changes that occur when they hit the age of puberty, whilst the Dove brand offers to improve self-esteem in women by being beautiful in their own skin, naturally.Teams Handling the BrandsWhat is surprising to know is that both brands are handled by teams that are spearheaded by male managers. However, there is a difference in leadership and how the teams conduct their meetings. Dove team is inclined to wear lighter colors, more like being on the soft side of things, featuring organic meals and light music. The Axe team, on the other hand, is more on the rebellious side of things. Members are more likely to wear black shirts and they conduct meetings with much gusto on late evenings with high-adrenaline activities and alcohol overflowing around them. New members of the team are being initiated into the “Axe Fraternity” by undergoing rituals with a bit of The Matrix touch.The Way Women are DepictedDove’s uplifting “Campaign for Real Beauty” actually earned commendations. Carefully looking into the ads, you will wonder how its parent company, Unilever, balances this kind of advertising with that of Axe which depicts scantily dressed modern women who are being seduced by men. In other words, Axe objectified women while Dove celebrates the natural beauty of women.The marketing experts from the Kellogg School of Management questioned this. How could Unilever have launched Dove’s campaign and be the same company behind Axe’s arguably corrupting depictions of women?Product Positioning and SalesThere is no doubt that even if Axe does continue to showcase it’s rather sensual or sexual advertisements, following its motto: “Sex Sells”, it continues to rake in more sales. This could be the reason why the parent company supports – though not verbally – the product position of its Axe brand.The product positioning of Dove, on the other hand, understands that it can sell beauty products through boosting women’s confidence, sticking to its goal that “profit and purpose can work well together.” When it comes to sales, Dove has gone a long way since it was launched in the 1950′s, bringing in billions of dollars to the company.Perhaps this is the main reason why Axe continues to stick to its positioning.Getting the Message AcrossThere is the fear that Axe’s campaign encourages inappropriate behavior among the males while Dove tries to encourage women to be proud of their innate beauty. However, critics find that Dove’s tagline in the “Real Beauty Sketches” video isn’t really encouraging women from different ethnicities and ages to be at ease with whatever kind of beauty they have. It seems that Dove is also trying to tell women that beauty equates to being young and thin.
- Nicholas mahut and john isner
- vimeo
- Focus on environment/sustainability + charity
- Taking technology and applying it to the needs of art
- StatusTransparencyGenerosityUtilityenvironement