jueves, 2 de septiembre de 2010

Communication + Virtual Teams


Summary: If intercontinental were a sou
nd... what would it be?
Author: Michael Spencer

The global brand team of Intercontinental Hotel & Resorts came up with a challenge of creating their own musical version of their brand's profile, the main idea was to explore the impact that the sound could make in their brand awareness and how it could become part of the brand identity. It is important and interesting to know how arts can be an important catalyst in reinforcing and building better business practices. The outcome was the creation of the global Sound Strategy, which integrated with InterContinental's new approach to guests relations, the idea was to, involve music and play it in public spaces of their hotels, in order to help to have a better position of the InterContinental brand.

The team was thinking about a way in which they could have an impact on the guests and how it could be meaningful to them, but without doing what they were expecting the hotel to do, like for instance having fine dinning or things that you can take for granted in a luxury hotel. They were looking for something more, some experience that the guests could take back home with them. That is why they hired two specialists in the emotional impact of sound to set up an initial development team; The team carried on a study, in which participated guests, executives from the hotel and also from the Holiday Inn, in this workshop they had different stages:
  1. Discussion of pre-work: They found out that one of the principal difficulties to face brand managers when making musical choices is overcoming their own subjective opinions. They also had difficulties when trying to explain the musical requirements for the brand, it was a requirement for the music not to be influenced by personal or emmotional attachment.
  2. Skills building: The team developed some musical understanding ityand critical assessment sikills by creating structures out of simple elements.
  3. Creating sounds for the brand: The group focused in how the brand's characterisctics and imagery might be transposed into aural equivalents. By making use of their new musical skills the group overcame the difficulties in making a literal transition from description to practical execution.
  4. Studio functionality: They examined the importance of the logical progression by starting whit practical ideas and advancing to more sophisticated ones, and also, they had the chance to get familiar with a working studio.
  5. Review: They had a presentation of their research findings and outcomes of the day. There were several reactions from the executives from the hotel, like for instance, one of the SVP stated that they realised that they had lessons to learn and that they need to be more flexible and learn to leave room for other people's creativity.
After implementing the project, the group came up with some conclusions regarding the whole process and the experience:
  • "It is fundamental to the success of any arts-based initiative that it responds to the business imperative of the client."
  • "Research into the organisation's econtext and culture is vital in order to respond effectively to any surprises."
  • "Any outcomes have to be converted into a practical and easily digested format appropriate for your client."
Summary: "Virtual team concepts in projects: A case study"
Palitha R. Kuruppuarachchi

Thanks to the relatively cheap and new information techologies that have arised lately, the emergence of the so called "virtual teams" has became more popular. They are created according to the organisation's needs, usually to collaborate on projects by utilizing the skills of the employees that are geographically dispersed.


Emergence of virtual teams:
It is possible for this teams to exist regardless of variables such as space, time and cultural boundaries, the main reason for them to keep together is a common purpose and the best way to achieve their goal or purpose is the utilization of the collaborative technologies in order to communicate effectively.
There are both push and pull forces that promote the use of virtual teams. The "business pull" would be the global expansion of the firms and the aim to penetrate new markets, the "technology push" would be the emergence of new technologies that allow the effective communication in a cheap way.

Drawbacks and benefits of virtual teams:
There are certain limitations that one has to keep in mind when setting up a virtual team, such as: multiple time zones, different languages, different approaches to conflict resolution and relatively high investments in trainning and implementation of new technologies. On the other hand, there are several benefits from the implementation of virtual teams, such as the recruitment of talented employees regardless of the distance, saving time and money, allowing the team members to have more time and space to carry on their personal life, etc..
It is important to say that, some benefits may have some negative effects, while some of the drawbacks may have some positive effects, furthermore, this classification of advantages and disadvantages is subjective.

Teams in general:
Regardless of the type of team, if it is virtual team, traditional team, telework, virtual group, etc, the design and support ot teams are vital in leading any team. There are 3 key considerations in order to decresase the adverse effects of teams, according to Hackman and Powell:
  1. The team has to be a clearly bounded group of people with a shared-collective responsibility for the outcome.
  2. The team leader has to establish basic norms of conduct and make these explicit.
  3. The reward systems of the organization have to recognize collective performance of the team.
It is common to see that teams in higly innovative and transformational environments often have issues regarding feedback management, establishing a good structure, solving problems and managing relationships.


Virtual teams vs colocated teams
There are several differences between both types of teams, both advantages and disadvantages, for instance, colocated teams have high levels of trust, clear communication, strong leadership, but on the other hand, virtual teams can also have some of these characteristics plus they are more dynamic as their members are dispersed geographically in different locations. There can be several limitations as well for virtual teams, like for instance, the lack of trust, difficulties to build relationships and managing cultural differences.

Based on the article “If Intercontinental were a sound…what would it be?”, Please discuss the implications (potential advantages, disadvantages, challenges, etc.) of using sounds to send strategic messages.

The use of sounds to increase the people's awareness towards a brand has became very popular lately, companies are using them to differentiate from other brands. It is a component of the Audio-visual brand identity that aims to increase the brand's recognition. For instance we might not even notice that companies do it all the time, but when we think about it, we realise that we associate several products to a brand or a concept by just hearing a sound, a song or a melody. For companies, can be challenging to adapt the sound to the message and values that they want to transmit to the public, because it can be very subjective. People react differently to different types of sounds that at the same time induce to several types of emotions. It is very difficult to standardized a sound to cause the same emotion in all the people, regardless of many variables, like age, gender, culture, etc...

But despite
all of those challenges, some companies have proven to have success in the implementation of sounds for their brand recognition, for instance, if we think about McDonald's and their "I love it" jingle, it is evident that almost everyone, when they hear the melody and the lyrics will recognize and associate it to McDonald's whitout hearing the brand on it. Besides, McDonald's has approached to almost every country and culture with the same campaing by translating "I love it" to different languages but using the same melody.





In my opinion, the use of sound to transmit strategic messages and increase the brand awareness can be very effective and successful but it requires to make several studies to make sure that the message will be delivered in the way that the company desires due to several variables that can modify it or change it like languages, culture, gender, etc...

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