The best practices of using Balanced Scorecard software in improving marketing strategies and public relations

Description: The case study demonstrates the advantages of using Balanced Score Card Designer software in correlating marketing efforts of a company spread across regions and achieving the desired synergies.

Sonic Communications – Implementing Marketing Strategies across geographical regions

Sonic Communications is a US-based multinational company that manufactures telephone equipments and other related accessories. The company has a firm presence in as many as nine European countries, each with its own Managing Director as head. The enterprise has its headquarters in France and the region is being headed by a Vice President, who informs about the collective performance of the entire region to the head office in the US. Back in 2008, the company decided to spruce up its profits and market share by revising its marketing and public relation strategies. Along the same line, the MDs Board called for an interactive framework that can help align the synergies of individual subsidiaries to ensure holistic growth of the company across the European region. This need for a communicative framework eventually prompted the Board to go for the Balanced Scorecard Designer software.

The case study can be broadly classified into following sections::

• The need of the Client;
• Procedures and best practices followed;
• Challenges;
• Outcomes attained.

• The need to manage a more complex pan-European change program that would include active participation of all individual regions;
• The requirement of a resolute framework that would facilitate enhanced communication among MDs, pinpointing their roles as the key components of a collaborative team, as well as defining a procedure that would help them maneuvering their shared schema.

To begin with, the change program was aimed at optimizing the total operational costs of the region by bringing some substantial operational as well as organizational restructuring into play. The most crucial transformation includes setting up manufacturing units at two distinct locations, one in the UK and the other in Spain. The other noticeable change involves setting up marketing headquarters of the entire region into three different locations. This would help in devising comprehensive marketing strategies that ensure overall growth of the company in the region. Furthermore, this would further give a broader picture of the marketing tactics being employed by the corresponding country heads.

The need of bringing in the aforementioned change program could only be addressed in the presence of a well defined and interactive framework. This enhanced interaction among various subsidiaries of the company would help MDs to carry out a joint marketing plan to achieve their shared goals

Procedures and Best Practices Followed

Balanced Scorecard Designer software presents businesses with a robust as well as reliable process to design the essential Balanced Scorecard for the company. The procedure entailed five useful conferences to help expected users to get well versed with the system. The project assumed with Sonic Communications incorporated following procedures:

• Creating a Project Team
  The foremost step in initiating the procedure of designing the suitable Balanced Scorecard is defining a focused team for the purpose. The team included experts on Balanced Scorecard Designer software and representatives from the client company.
• Five Conferences
  In addition to the MDs and VP of the European region, the process of designing Balanced Scorecard also saw active participations from Global HR Head and Business Development chief of Sonic Communications. This active involvement proved to be handy to help design Balanced Scorecard in line with the broad corporate objectives. The entire process from Balanced Scorecard designer took five conferences, each separated with a gap of two-weeks, thereby making the whole procedure to take around three months.
• After-development Training
  Maintaining a Balanced Scorecard is an extremely simple yet crucial task that further paves way for the adequate usage of the system. In order to ensure effective maintenance of the system, an inter-organizational team was defined. The team is responsible to help organization bringing upon essential changes within the system and ensuring the proper functioning of the system.
• Evaluation Meetings
  Balanced Scorecard has been preferred in the business domains world over for its capability to disseminate the company’s shared objective strategic evaluation meetings within the organizational framework. These crucial meetings primarily focus on making practical interventions to keep their operations aligned with corporate objectives, and hence deliver the sought after outcomes. If necessary, these meetings further revisit their goals to optimize their resources well. In a bid to capitalize on these periodic meetings, the enterprise should have a well planned preparation, which includes collecting the data needed to color the corresponding sections of the balanced scorecard, as well as reviewing the specified issues underpinned by the act of information gathering.

Challenges

• The need to link overall corporate objectives with KPIs
  At every step of the designing procedure, it was imperative to stay in line with the KPIs set by the US head office. However, the presence of the two Global Heads from the company was instrumental in ensuring that the corporate objectives should be at the center.
• Cultural diversities
  Setting forth the universal needs that can cater to the requirements of every region was a rather cumbersome task, primarily in the wake of the cultural differences of the region. Incidentally, these diversities further hindered the experts from various regions to interact initially. Nevertheless, the challenge was addressed properly and eventually a sense of oneness was instilled within the participants.

Outcomes Attained

• The pan-European MDs Board has finally been able to come up with shared mid- and long-term marketing objectives that have been communicated across all the subsidiaries of the region. Moreover clarity was achieved in formulating a clear advertising plan and selecting the correct media mix.
• The Board eventually struck out common marketing and public relations strategies to best serve the marketing needs of the region, taking the growth of the region as a whole.
• One latent benefit was that the entire procedure helped bridging the cultural gap between subsidiaries of the company and built communicative channels among its different parts within the region. The balanced scorecard designer software allowed the company to better tailor their customer relationship initiatives in specific regions in a comprehensive manner.

The case study on Sonic Communication emphasizes on some of the best practices of using Balanced Scorecard in bolstering up the marketing and public relations techniques within a certain region. Explicitly, Sonic Communications had following benefits from using the Balanced Scorecard Designer software:

• Integrated pan-European Marketing Strategies
  The Balanced Scorecard software finally facilitated the management to have suitably defined marketing tactics, thereby helping them to steer their marketing drives as a unit. This brought down the operational costs down substantially, while enhancing the productivity of marketing plans. Essentially it allowed the top management to build a marketing plan which the local management at different locations can customize as per their necessity.
• Formalization of the blueprint for strategic application
  Documenting the strategic linkage blueprint, containing both the results as well as notable activities to be opted by the team, in addition to the ideas about how these things are linked, eventually proved of utmost use in communicating the shared objectives within the organization. In other words, the Balanced Scorecard Designer software was able to transparently present the broader marketing objectives which most employees were able to comprehend.