Basic Business Philosophy and Corporate Strategy of Lion Bridge

1. What is the basic business philosophy and corporate/business strategy of the company that provides this service? Describe how this service fits with the corporate philosophy and corporate strategy.

2. Explain this service’s sustainable competitive advantage and why you believe this is a sustainable competitive advantage. Discuss how this service can be used to expand the business and what corporate growth strategy should be used by the company and why.

3. Conduct a Porter’s Five Forces analysis on the above mentioned service. For each of the five forces, discuss at least 2-3 factors that affect your service. Based on this analysis, what recommendations would you make to the CEO?

4. Who is the target market for the service? Why do you believe this? What should be a future market segment and why? For this future market segment, what strategy should be used and why? Be specific.

5. Identify the market position that this service has. (Hint: market position is NOT size or share. One way to help you answer this question is to discuss what comes to the consumers’ minds when they are asked about the service.) Discuss the market strategy that should be used relative to the position identified. Does the company use this strategy? Make sure to provide specific examples. How effective is this position for your service? Discuss the potential effect of repositioning the service and what the company would need to do to reposition the service.

6. What is the market share for this service? Is market share expected to grow, decline, or remain the same? Why? Based on the service’s stage of the PLC, explain strategies the company can use to increase share gains. Discuss the implications to the company to obtain an increase in share. Will the return on the investment be worth it? Why or why not?

7. Identify 2-3 challengers (competitors) of this service. If you were a consultant for the challenger, what strategy would you recommend to gain share over this service? For each challenger, is the best strategy being used? Why or why not? How would you counter this strategy if you were the decision maker regarding the service you identified in question 1? Why do you think this strategy would be the best? Provide specific examples.

8. Interpret syndication of information as the use of social media. Describe how social media is used for your service (i.e., identify and explain the various tools used for service promotion and brand building for your service). Is the current strategy being used the best one? Why or why not? What recommendations would you make to use/change how social media is used advantageously for your service? Has your service had to deal with counteracting negative social media? If so, explain how the company did this. If not, what recommendations would you make if a negative message was posted on social media about your service? Explain and provide recommendations for change.

Sustainable Competitive Advantage and Corporate Growth Strategy

Lion Bridge provides global social media marketing services. The philosophy of Lion Bridge defines that appreciation of benefits and satisfaction of things and services is a genuine effort to build a long term relationship with customers. The company has been able to achieve success in global marketing by utilizing the most used platform to appreciate their clients’ product and services. The business strategy of the organization is to utilize social media platforms for brand recognisation and brand building. Corporate philosophy of Lion Bridge is that global companies must have good relationship with their customers and communities in order to promote globalization. Therefore, company is contributing in it by utilizing social media platforms (Lionbridge, 2016).

Global social marketing services have potential to gain sustainable competitive advantage in the global marketing industry. The era of internet and smart phones has impacted several industries, social media platforms have been best platform to connect with potential customers, communities and other stakeholders. Therefore, global social marketing services have potential to make an organization competitive for long term. Lion Bridge can expand its services by launching integrated marketing programs that best utilizes traditional and online marketing approaches. The company must utilize strategic alliances with leaders of industry in different regions as their corporate strategy to establish the organization in different regions.

Porter’s five forces model has 5 forces: bargaining power of supplier, bargaining power of substitutes, bargaining power of buyers, and threat of new entrants and industry rivalry.

Bargaining power of supplier: Bargaining power of supplier is less and factors that affect the power of supplier can be associated with third party dependency and merchandise.   

Bargaining power of substitutes: Bargaining power of substitutes is also less because of the increasing trend of social media popularity.

Bargaining power of buyers: Buyers power is high because of the high competition in the industry. In this scenario, quality of service affects the services most.

Threat of new entrants: Threat of new entrants is also high as there are so many new starters entering in the industry.

Industry rivalry: Industry rivalry is high because of the new emerging market and popularity.

Target Market: Future Market segments: Brands looking to engage their customers via social media platforms

Future target market: Brands and companies looking for online branding solutions, or willing to establish online brand

Strategy: The Company must provide unique set of programs to gain competitive advantage in the organization.

Porter’s Five Forces Analysis on Global Social Media Marketing Services

Market position of the service

• Facebook 45,6% (-)
• YouTube 21,5% (+)
• Twitter 4,73% (+)

Effective strategies: inbound marketing, Youtube marketing, channel development and content marketing are effective strategies that companies are using to stay in competitive in the market. In addition to these strategies quality of communication and services is also playing a major role in the industry.  

Lion Bridge Strategy utilizes all strategies by featuring it with effective 24/7 engagement, first touch customer services and real time engagement. 

Annual growth of mobile social users is increasing day by day; customer engagement via social media marketing has been so easy for the organizations. The increasing trend of social users depicts a continuous growth in share of the service. On the basis of annual growth in Jan 2016 the market will be growing in coming year. As per the product life cycle stage, at growing stage the company needs increase brand preference in order to gain share gains.

Source: Global Social Media Statistics Summary 2016

The organization can build their own channels to gain completive advantage in the market as being leader on inventor of a new channel. If the company gets success in achieving market position that it will help the organization to gain sustainable competitive advantage in the market. The return on investment will be worth because the market is in growth stage and it will remain for long period. In this scenario, if a company can target new market position that it would definitely reflect good ROI.

SEO services: The first competitor of the service is search engine optimizers who utilizes online and offline strategies to gain market share in online global marketing industry. Social media platforms such as face book have been tough competition to search engines like Google and yahoo. SEO services can gain share by focusing on providing value to customers and readers to get organic traffic.

Online reputation management: Social media has a drawback of lack of informative content. In this scenario, search engines are more considered more authentic for reputation management.

Knowledge sharing and content marketing: Again social media is a good platform to share knowledge and content but these services needs to be developed on World Wide Web.

The company has been using SMM (social media marketing) to market itself, as the company itself been a online marketing company it has to be good in it. The company is using effective SMM techniques to engage its customers.

If there are some negative comments about the company then it can utilize online reputation management where positive posts are written and posted so that negative posts get downs in search engine ranking.

References

Global Social Media Solutions | Global Marketing Services | Lionbridge. (2016). Lionbridge.com. Retrieved 17 July 2016, from https://www.lionbridge.com/solutions/global-social-media/

Global Social Media Statistics Summary 2016. (2016). Smart Insights. Retrieved 17 July 2016, from https://www.smartinsights.com/social-media-marketing/social-media-strategy/new-global-social-media-research/