I was fortunate in that I was able to work with motivated and capable people during all of my internship experiences. My most particular experience was when I worked for Nivea -a skincare firm. During my summer internship at Nivea, I worked with a marketing team made up of four other young, full-time employees. The team leader was 25 and had worked with the firm since graduation so therefore was deemed the most qualified out of all of us. The team system worked in a way that everyone was responsible for a particular task which comprised of visual marketing, textual marketing, cost analysis, plan implementation and brand development. In this sense, everyone was accountable for their respective tasks. It is however important to note that the team leader would be held accountable for any mishaps and that this point was known to the team.
I deem the team successful because we managed to turn in a project proposal a week earlier than deadline. This proposal was later cleared by the marketing head and implemented in a advertising campaign across PC and mobile platforms.
There are several factors that made this team successful, the most important one being our closeness of age. I reference age because this internship was in Asia where age hierarchy dominates many aspects of work life. In a marketing campaign, fresh and novel ideas are just as important as the implementation and realization of the idea. I've heard from many colleagues I worked with during that summer about older team leaders who were resistant to change and new ideas because they were more concerned with posting acceptable results and playing it safe rather than hitting the ball out of the park by treading through unfamiliar territory. Another issue with age is that seniority often dominates the decision making process of the team in that those who are older have way more sway than those who are younger. Having a young team meant that communication was easy people were receptive of thinking outside the box. This was incredibly important to our project as the product we were trying to market had a target demographic of males between the age of 20 and 35. We had great team chemistry, but when deadlines had to be met, the team leader was firm and held each of us accountable for our work. Due to us being comfortable with each other, we coordinated our work better as well. An example was the the clear line of communication between each of us and the person in charge of cost analysis. Due to the tight budget constraints of marketing campaigns, unforeseen costs must be accounted for and communicated clearly so that running over the allocated funds would not become a hurdle that would delay the project.
I wonder if there are other affinities apart from age that mattered for your teamwork. For example, if age correlates with going to college or having gone to college, with younger workers or interns likely for that to happen while for older ones not, then age might be serving as a proxy for other possible explanations. Overseas travel could be another one of these as might knowledge of English.
ReplyDeleteI did a quick Google search on nivea company and found this page about Beiersdorf. One of their other products is Eucerin, which I've used on occasion because I suffer from chronic dry skin. But I also use products from other companies. Knowing my own behavior in this area, I would never buy any such product unless a dermatologist I saw encouraged that. I wonder if men in the U.S. in the age bracket you describe are different. I don't think such marketing would have been effective on me when I was that age.
One thing we will talk about in class tomorrow, which I will ask here, is even if somebody else was accountable for a task, if other team members gave feedback to help improve performance of the tasks where they weren't directly responsible. It seems to me that sort of feedback is typically needed to make a team successful.
Age would not have correlated with going to college because the company only hires those with a degree. Similarly, only those who have a firm grasp of the English language are hired. Overseas travel and work experience however would definitely factor in as well given that Nivea is an international brand.
DeleteEucerin is interesting because the brand does tremendously well in Europe and America but has flopped completely in Asia. The brand was actually pulled from offline shelves and is only sold in online platforms to save cost because of it's poor performance. The marketing research team concluded that this difference in consumer behavior is due to American and European consumers being more mature in that they value the quality of the product (Eucerin is strong in this area as it has great reviews from consumers and dermatologists) over the branding (Eucerin has never adopted the strategy of heavy advertising and branding visuals to attract customers).