An up-and-coming (and very ambitious) design firm is unexpectedly invited to bid for a work against more prominent competitors. The job: Design the logo and other elements of the public identity of the national sports team. Winning will vault e-Types to much greater prominence. Their work will be displayed on TV and on t-shirts. And they believe they have what it takes to win. But there's a problem. The e-Types designers, who have always thought of themselves as design revolutionaries, don't like the guidance they're receiving from this somewhat conservative client. In short, the designers think what the client is asking for is BORING. It's not the kind of work they want to do or be known for…now or ever! Meanwhile, more business oriented e-Types managers and staff can hardly believe what they're hearing from the designers -- don't they see the opportunity? This is business and there's money to be made. The designers should GET OVER THEMSELVES and satisfy the customer. Right? Controversy grips e-Types. At stake: what kind of company will they be going forward? Can they continue to be revolutionary and still satisfy their growth ambitions? Or is it time for them to "grow up" in order to appeal to a wider range of customers. The battle is on for the soul of this company -- what will YOU recommend?
In order to complete this assignment, you need to think critically about how to formulate a good firm strategy. Although some general information about the company is provided below, you will have to do some research on the firm, its current position, and strategic prospects. Eventually, you will have to figure out what a good strategy is all about and how e-Types may successfully "go forward".
Please note that for those of you taking the Specialization, this assignment is somewhat similar to the assignment made in the first course. However, while you in the first course were asked to decide on the design, the purpose here is to formulate a strategy for the firm.
By the way, you may want to check out e-Types' homepage: http://e-types.com/
Drawing on the content covered in this course, your end-of-course assignment is to formulate a strong strategy that shall lay the foundation for how e-Types should move forward. You decide yourself what you decide to focus on and emphasize in the strategy. What is important, however, is that you show a profound understanding of the company, its situation, and how it can best move forward. Drawing extensively on the topics covered in the course when formulating your strategy is a benefit.
Formally, the overall assignment question can therefore be described as follows: What should e-Types do going forward?
In terms of actual deliverables to complete the assignment, you will have to upload two documents for peer-review:
- An executive written summary of maximum 2 pages that shall describe the core of your proposed strategy.
- A power point presentation of maximum 8 slides that shall support the 2-page executive summary. The powerpoint slides should be self-explanatory. That is, you should not only formulate some bullet points that require substantial oral elaboration.
The two documents shall therefore complement each other in terms of formulating a strong strategy for e-Types.
Good luck!
Review Criteria
In terms of reviewing the assignments, you will be asked to assess each other in terms of the extent to which you successfully fulfill the learning objectives of the course through the formulated strategy. There will therefore be four questions for the peer review, each representing one learning objective: - Identify why a strong strategy is essential for the future business success.
- Formulate a business strategy that suits the needs and visions of your organization.
3.Explain why managers too often formulate sub-optimal strategies. - Extrapolate measures to optimize current business strategies.
The idea with the learning objectives can be explained as follows: - The first learning objective seeks to ensure that the learner has understood the general importance of formulating strategies for future success. Thus, rather than just “assuming” that strategies are important, the learner should be able to explain why and how strategies are important
- The second learning objective deals more with the strategy formulation itself. The intention here is to enable the learning to draw on relevant concepts and frameworks for formulating a good strategy that fits the firm and the environment.
- The third learning objective intentionally seeks to enable students to identify the boundaries of strategies. Why are some strategies less good? Why is it so that firms are unable to formulate good strategies? Thus, learners should account for reasons that may jeopardize good strategy formulation.
- Finally, the forth learning objective deals with the more operational side of the strategy formulation. Is the learner able to formulate a realistic and believable strategy? Does the strategy “make sense”? Thus, learners should be able to formulate a strategy that can actually be acted upon.
To facilitate the peer-review process, you will under each learning objective be asked to assess on a scale from 1 to 5 how well the individual learning objectives are reflected in the submission. You will also be asked to provide constructive feedback to your fellow learners on how the submission can be improved.
Taken together, the exercise will train you to both formulate a strong strategy as well as identify strong and weak elements in other strategies.
((the course papers))
((information on video 1))
eTypes is a design firm
based in Copenhagen. And it's a design firm that's on the rise. It's an ambitious firm. It's a successful firm. It's profitable. At the time of the case,
it's extremely busy. Everybody's working hard. Everybody's working extra hours. It's expanding, it has an expanding
base of international clients. If we look at its history, it's the result
of several mergers of smaller firms. eTypes got its start
when four graduates of the Danish Design School decided to
get together and start a business. They had just graduated from
the Danish Design School. And they decided that they didn't
like what they saw there very much. They had seen the world of design, and they decided they didn't
like it very much. And so they adopted a phrase,
they wanted to smash the world. They wanted to smash the world of design. So this was the beginning of a firm
that considered itself extremely edgy. Extremely revolutionary. We're gonna take a look
at some research video. This is research video, I apologize for
the quality of it, it's a little grainy. You may have to listen a little closely,
but this is people from eTypes describing
the essence of their business. So it's important that we hear
from them about what they do. In their own words, let's watch.
((information on video 2))
We do identity and
the full range of identity from graphic design to
who's the company and how they should answer the phone and
pick a story for the company they can use in any way. Like, with a trampoline
you can jump forward. >> So as a company as it is today is
rooted actually in a sort of very classical graphic design tradition taking
on more the roles of the consultant or a trusted advisors who come to me. Someone you can trust with your identity. And the best projects we make,
I think it's the ones where people say, I mean, this is what we've
been thinking all this time, and we were just not able
to express it ourselves. So where we don't make like
a fast makeover of something or tells people to say something or
whatever, that's not the way we work. But where we sort of dig deep
into the soul of the company. And also the strategy of the company
where it wants to go and then finds out how to express this in a way that
people think this is themselves and maybe it's even more themselves than what
they had been able to say by themselves. Identity is both about identification
with something with values or whatever, but it's also about aspiration
that you're striving for a goal. Say that identity's really
about a sense of belonging and also a sense of striving towards
something, a sense of becoming to make, to create an identity that people
feel at home but also that they have to, you know, they have to work
everyday to fulfill the promise. Because it's all for
a promise that's not yet realized. So, it might sound over profound for [INAUDIBLE] but we really, you know,
we really take what we do very serious.
So that's who e-Types is,
in their own words. What we're going to focus in on now,
is the situation that faced them in 2006, which will be the focus
of our capstone project. In 2006, e-Types, an up and
coming, ambitious, design firm, was invited unexpectedly to
participate in a design competition. They were competing against two
other much more prominent firms. That's why they were surprised. And it was a very prominent competition. It was a competition to
provide new logos and new identity for
Denmark's national sports team. So the logo that they defined, the look
that they defined would be on television, it would be on shirts,
it would be on hats. It would be on anything that
Team Danmark fans wore or encountered at a sports event. Very, very high visibility for the winner. A very big deal for
e-Types if they could win. The problem that e-Types had is
that they had two designs, not one. They began with the brief, the document
provided to them by Team Danmark, the document that described what Team
Danmark was asking for in a new logo and a new identity. And they developed a design very quickly
from that and it fit very well and people thought it was a good design. But there was a problem,
the designers didn't like it. These are smash the world,
revolutionary, edgy designers, remember. And they decided that this logo,
this identity was boring, that it wasn't the kind of
work that they were proud of. And so
they went back to the drawing board and produced a much more radical design,
which they called the edgy design. The designers love this one. But, everyone agreed that it might
just be too radical for the client. It's important to pause for a moment to note that a design competition
is not the way e-Types likes to work. You heard them say it themselves. They like to dig into
the soul of a company. They like to learn what a company is about better than the company
knows it themselves. They can't do that in
a design competition. Everyone who is in the competition
has to work from the same document, the design brief. e-Types can't just call up Team Danmark
and say I have a few more questions, because that would be unfair to the other
competitors in the design competition. The only thing they have to
work with is the brief, and that's not the way e-Types likes to work. The fact that they had two designs
generated a huge controversy. In the end, they came up wit three options
for how they thought they might proceed. Option 1, Present only
the edgy design to the client. Now, they estimated the probability
of winning the competition if they went this route
was only about 20%. And by the way,
the designers agreed with that. The designers agreed that the edgy
design was unlikely to win. But they didn't care. They weren't proud of the other design. They wanted to present work
that they were proud of, that fit their smash the world spirit. Option 2, present only
the classical design to the client. Here they believed, and by the way, these
numbers are just their own estimates, they could be wrong about this. But they thought they had
a very strong conservative, too conservative as far as the designers
were concerned, classical design. They believe that they would have about
an 80% chance of winning the competition if they went with the classical design. Again, the designers were
adamantly opposed to it, despite its high probability of winning. Option 3,
they could present both designs and let the client choose which
design the client liked. Now, let's pause for a moment, and
we're gonna hear e-Types in another one of those grainy research videos,
so apologies for that. We're gonna hear them debating,
within e-Types, which way they should go,
edgy, classical, or both. We'll be right back.
((information on video 3))
Do we do what we believe, or should we
do what we expect the client to want? And then the question became should
we present only this the new version, or should we present two parallel things,
the new and the traditional, knowing that they'd
probably go for the traditional. >> Why will the competition,
and maybe you earn some money, but it's not that big amount of money and you make this thing that doesn't
have any meaning for you. I mean, you don't want to show it
to anybody and every time it's shown on television or
something you're saying, I did that. [LAUGH]
Now, there are two different
currencies in this company. We have money, like cash flow,
deng comma, and then we have prestige slash street respect slash,
doing something great. And some times the currencies work in
the same direction, and some times you can get a lot of one currency but then not
get the other, and then how do we choose? And here we had a lot of work and
a lot of cash flow, and we could make the decision based upon what
we felt was right for our design style. A little bit of what we want for
the client, also. And, in the end, also the decision was about what
kind of company do we want to be? Do we want to be the kind of company that
just does stuff with the client once or the company that challenges our clients? Integrity [INAUDIBLE] and then currency. We did really well and
maybe also in the longer run, getting a client because of that and
of course we didn't get this project.