Questions:
Task 1:
1. GOALS AND OBJECTIVES: What are the goals/objectives of the company in this situation? What is it that the company wants to achieve? Before the company takes any action, it should be clear on what it is trying to accomplish.
2. STATEMENT OF ISSUE: What is the issue that needs to be decided in this case? Describe
3. SOLUTION ALTERNATIVES: What are 3 different alternative courses of action that can be taken to address this issue? Explain
4. RECOMMENDATION: Which one of your 3 options do you recommend? Why? How does this recommendation help the company to address the issues and to achieve their goals?
5. ACTION STEPS: What are the specific action steps that can be taken to IMPLENT your decision and to turn it into reality? What needs to be actually done?
6. How many words are in your answers total?
Task 2:
1. Describe Dropbox’s “Freemium Pricing strategy” to get users and revenue. What was this strategy? What did the company hope to accomplish with this strategy?
2. What were the positive results of this strategy?
3. What were the negative results or failures of this strategy, if any?
4. What was the strategy that Dropbox used for corporate/business customers? Describe this strategy and its results?
5. What are 2-3 other strategies can you think of that Dropbox could have chosen, instead of Freemium Pricing?
Answers:
Task 1:
1. Goals and Objectives
Hathaway Jones is highly interested in updating the image, as the brand image is gradually getting old fast by the market research standards. Therefore, the company would like to hire such a team that can accomplish this goal as well as bring in the youth, intelligent executives like Mimi that seems to be an excellent start for the company (Coulter 2010). Therefore, the goal of the company is to strengthen the reputation and the brand name of the company Hathaway Jones with proper recruitment of a person in the organization.
2. Statement of Issue
Mimi applied for a job and she was highly qualified for the position. However, sustainability of her was being called into some questions after human resources were found some disturbing information about het online. Therefore, it can be said that whether or not Mimi should be further considered for her applied position in Hathway Jones (Coutu 2007). This is due to Mimi’s online exposure of her declaration over China makes provides a basis for the decision of not to hire Mimi since the China based members of the company might possibly ascertain what Virginia found with the touch of her fingerprints on the internet. The main issue in this regard is the past actions of Mimi that can defame the reputation of the organization. Along with that, the characteristics of Mimi might be destructive as some points of time and this can harm the organization largely (Coutu 2007).
The company has been facing difficult times in the organization and at the same time, it can be found that the growing economy of China provides a huge opportunity in the luxurious segment. It has been found that Mimi is saucy as well as creative and has brought up in China. From the career report, it can be found that she has successfully launched two popular brands and has insights on the development of the brands in China. However, in this case, the major concern is that Mimi was involved in the protests against China after her graduation (Coutu 2007).
3. Solution Alternatives
Already it has been found that Mimi has applied for a job but the concern is that the characteristics of Mimi have questioned her ability and this has raised a question in the professional field. From internet it has been found that Mimi was once involved in the protests against China after completion of her graduation (Hill and Jones 2012). It has been found that Mimi heard that Fred planned to expand the business in Philadelphia based Hathaway Jones into China and therefore, she wanted to be a part of this. In this regards, some of the possible solution operations can be suggested and they have been discussed here:
- Firstly, it can be suggested that take Mimi for the China’s Operations
- Secondly, it can be said that do not take Mimi in any company as well as any functions
- Thirdly, it can be suggested that the company can have another round of interviews ad based on the answers they give over the telephone (Lasserre 2012)
- Another alternations that can be provided here is that hire Mimi for the American Operation process as well as keep her as a integral part of the strategic team of the Chinese operations (Lynch 2012)
4. Recommendation
After discussing the possible solutions alternatives, it is important to discuss about the best recommendation of the addressed problem in the organization. It can be recommended that the company must hire Mimi considering her experiences and potentialities in the company. Therefore, the company must hire Mimi for the American operation but keep her as one of the most important parts of the strategic team of the Chinese operations (Petit 2012).
5. Action Steps
The company must give her an offer and in parallel, clearly explain her the situation that has arose in the organization as well as some other possible situations that might take place in the organization in the near future. The management of the company is required to tell her that she would not be heading the Chinese operations in the company but would be considered as one of the integral parts of the decision making as well as strategy making group of the organization. Apart from that, it is highly important to ask Mimi to improve her Public Relations by the writing an article regarding the development of China (Subba Rao 2010).
6. Total words in the answer sheet
Total word count in this answer sheet is 1250 words.
Task 2:
1. Freemium Pricing at Dropbox
Dropbox is an online storage company that provides remote storage over the internet of any types of the computer files as well as gives the facility to share files, synchronize and backup. It has been found that basic service of Dropbox was free of cist and the premium service was paid. However, reports have found that only an estimated 1.6% to 4% of the users give any revenue to the company (Teixeira and Watkins 2016). Inspired to manufacture a service that would allow the people to bring all the files anywhere with no requirement to email around the attachments, two MIT students founded the company in the year 2007 and after that, they raised $7.2 million as their seed funding.
2. Positive results of this strategy
In this part, it is highly important to discuss the positive results of the adopted strategy of Dropbox;
- It is very easy to use and share Dropbox
- It provides the users the facility to sync tools, web uploading and publishing some tools
- Pursuing partnership with android
- Pre-installation in the Smartphone (Teixeira and Watkins 2016)
- The company offers services in several languages
3. Negative results of the strategy
After discussing the positive results of Dropbox, it is highly important to discuss about the negative results of Dropbox and these have been discussed here;
- Clients faces several issues in case of installation and thus the clients have reported unsuccessful interaction in Dropbox
- The company is unknown in the overall business segment
- One of the major negative sites of Dropbox is the lack of the own servers. It has been found that the company uses clouds platforms like Amazon S3 (Vecchiato 2012)
- Several available applications that do the same type of tasks
4. Strategy used by Dropbox for the business customers
In order to avoid common pitfall, Dropbox has been changing the approach and has been following the strategy of another tech giant, i.e. Microsoft. As per the available information, it has been found that Dropbox has been deploying a sales strategy that gives more focus on partners and resellers. They have implemented some growth hacks like incentivize some of the current users to refer others, sign up driven home page, easy sign up process are some of the strategies that Dropbox has adopted for the business customers (Thompson and Martin 2010).
5. Alternative strategies
- It has been found that the major issue of the Freemium issue is that it attracts the users who will never pay and will use the resource of the company and increase the cost of the company. Therefore, Dropbox could have arranged minimum cost for the users.
- The company is required to filter the users who will never switch to premium plans and make some strategies for them accordingly (Vecchiato 2012)
- The pricing strategy of the company is required to revise, as the company have many users who do not pay money for using Dropbox
References
Coulter, M., 2010. Strategic management in action. Boston: Prentice Hall.
Coutu, D., 2007. We Googled You. [online] Harvard Business Review. Available at: <https://hbr.org/2007/06/we-googled-you-2> [Accessed 25 Jan. 2016].
Hill, C. and Jones, G., 2012. Strategic management essentials. [Mason, Ohio]: South-Western.
Lasserre, P., 2012. Global strategic management. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lynch, R., 2012. Strategic management. Harlow, England: Pearson.
Petit, Y., 2012. Advancing project and portfolio management research: applying strategic management theories. Strategic Direction, 28(9).
Subba Rao, P., 2010. Strategic management. Mumbai [India]: Himalaya Pub. House.
Teixeira, T. and Watkins, E., 2016. Freemium Pricing at Dropbox. [online] Hbr.org. Available at: <https://hbr.org/product/freemium-pricing-at-dropbox/514053-PDF-ENG> [Accessed 25 Jan. 2016].
Thompson, J. and Martin, F., 2010. Strategic management. Andover: South-Western Cengage Learning.
Vecchiato, R., 2012. Strategic foresight: matching environmental uncertainty. Technology Analysis & Strategic Management, 24(8), pp.783-796.
