Formative Assessment 1 [100 marks]

Answer ALL questions in this section

Marketing and Advertising While establishing a differentiated meaning for a brand is tough, perhaps the greater challenge facing marketers today is the growing number of places consumers touch a brand. Its become incredibly more complicated to execute a brand promise. This is what we call bringing the brand to life. Consumers are interacting with brands in myriad new ways, but brand organizations have to move much faster. They have to show greater agility and responsiveness to potential followers actions and reactions. This often must be at warp-speed in this rapidly changing environment. The heart of the NASA marketing strategy is their brand. The brand is built into and reflected by its tag line the happiest place on earth. They understand that their brand is not about them. Rather it is about how their community sees them, feels about them, and talks about them. They realize that their brand represents their current and future relationships. Their goal is to deliver an emotional connection to their public products. And they are doing it very well. In their recent book, Marketing the Moon (MIT Press, 2014), Scott and Jurek trace the Apollo-era collaboration between private industry and NASAs internal public affairs office. They contend that the massive campaigns launched then were some of the first deployments of what wed call brand journalism and real-time marketing today. In fact, what Mars One is doing, with reality TV, brand partnerships, and an upcoming book called Mars One: The Human Factor says Scott is largely the same as Apollo but updated for today. Lansdorp would be lucky to recreate that success: in July of 1969, 94 percent of American televisions were tuned to the Apollo 11s moon landing. And such widespread enthusiasm for the event was the culmination of a decade-long campaign to educate the public. NASAs PR staff were broadcast- and print-media veterans and they served up copy like a newsroom. The team grilled engineers for stories churned out bylined articles and sent press releases meant to be copied verbatim by news outlets. They produced pre-packaged broadcast segments that often made it straight to the airwaves. In the early days, the office largely strove to introduce and explain complex technologies, tech that had previously been used mostly by soldiers and military men, to both the press and the public. It was a task that, for over a decade, private companies involved in spaceflight were eager to augment. As a government agency coordinating with the military and Congress, NASA ultimately dealt in the release of information and facts. But private companies who earned NASA contracts often employed more glamorous tactics, including colorful press kits and advertisements for the watchs astronauts wore, the Tang they slurped from packets, the cameras they used, and the companies like IBM that helped build their spaceships. NASA did, however, enforce some restrictions. The agencys photos were taxpayer-funded, so private companies could use them in advertisements without paying to license them as long as NASAs public affairs office approved how they were used. But NASA found itself blindsided by what would become its most in-demand asset: the astronauts themselves. To maintain control over the astronauts public profiles, the agency signed a deal with Life magazine, essentially granting the publisher exclusive rights to the astronauts lives. There arent many businesses or brands in the world that can rival NASAs social media game. While the stereotypical image of NASA employees is that of serious people wearing lab coats and discussing incomprehensible rocket science, the premier space organization showed the world that it could form connections with even those people who have an aversion to science. Today, NASA boasts of over 120 million followers across all social media sites, on which it handles over 500 accounts. While you may think to gain such a massive following wasnt a particularly difficult task for NASA the organization put a ton of effort into making it happen. One thing that has boosted NASAs popularity on social media sites is their unexpected humor. As one of the foremost pioneers of technology in this century, no one could have faulted NASA if they had decided to adopt a serious and scientific tone for their social posts. But the company did what no one expected they were funny. Using a first-person voice peppered with witty phrases for their spacecraft deployed on extra-terrestrial missions, NASA brought a whole new dynamic to engaging audiences on social media. The space agency has also taken to sharing the latest cosmic images, sent by its various spacecraft, on Instagram even before theyre released to the media. Since images of nebulas, galaxies, black holes, and the like are instant attention grabbers, NASA capitalizes on it by providing information about the cosmological entities which most people would otherwise have no interest in learning about. The NASA web sites are the physical center of this Agencys marketing. Their designs are very user-friendly, yet contain the means to integrate all the strategy elements we discuss today. They encompass several ways to allow two-way client engagements, including live chat, email, and telephone. In 2016 NASAs Astronaut, Scott Kelly returned from a one-year space mission aimed to test the limits of human endurance in space. While in space using the hashtag #A Year in Space, millions of spectators followed the year-long adventure and its near endless stories. Astronaut Kelly tweeted, posted content on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook (including Facebook Live Sessions), and Snapchat. NASA looked to engage a whole new audience, by using platforms that millennials would use. As a result, they sparked fresh interest in younger generations. The NASA marketing strategy is in a state of continual change with new and creative ideas. A very progressive organization which keeps up to speed on consumer trends and needs. Certainly, always eager to adapt their expertise to new areas. And certainly, always looking to try new things, to include marketing. NASA utilizes all the main marketing elements, channels/platforms to engage potential clients. All channels are used to engage and conversationally share all their material. They are always looking to engage and learn and serve customers. NASAs mission to achieve the unexpected extends to its marketing initiatives, which have developed over time into a tremendously effective program. Following the 2008 Twitter announcement that spacecraft Phoenix had found water on Mars, the NASA Twitter account gained 75,000 followers and became the eighth most followed account on the platform at the time and a radical restructuring of its operating environment due to the emergence of commercial space, all of which have forced the organization to change. NASA today is a very different beast from the NASA of the 1960s. Over the past few decades, not only has NASA delivered crucial technologies for society, such as water filtration systems, satellite-based search-andrescue, and UV coating on eyeglasses, it has also evolved its dominant logic and business model. NASA has moved from being a hierarchical, closed system that develops its technologies internally, to an open network organization that embraces open innovation, agility, and collaboration. This reinvention demonstrates that substantial organizational change is possible, even amid barriers such as regulations and politics. It offers an example of what we call strategic agility, or the ability to effectively (and continually) adapt how a firm operates and competes. This is not driven by a single leader, but by a multitude of champions scattered around the organization who push forward initiatives that slowly create change. The network model began with the Commercial Resupply Services program that launched in 2006 to carry cargo to the International Space Station after the space shuttle was retired. The space shuttles retirement meant that NASA had to find other ways to resupply the ISS that would not only be reliable but also require fewer resources than the space shuttle. This and a number of different factors, budget pressures, government interest in promoting commercial space, and rapidly growing commercial expertise in space led NASA to seek suitable commercial partners. NASA wanted to use part of its budget not only to buy services it needed, such as to resupply the ISS with cargo, but also to spur the growth of commercial space. NASA looked for outside partners because it recognized that the expertise was now available in the open market to deliver frontier capabilities, at lower cost compared to what NASA could develop them for.

Question 1 25 Marks

Based on the case study, advise NASA management of the importance of aligning the company's supporting activities with the overall business mission.