Discuss about the Ambiguity in Projects.
Ambiguity, in the literal sense of the world, refers to the situation or a statement that can lead to more than one interpretation. According to Philippo et al. (2013), one of the most essential criteria that is expected of project managers is to have the capability of managing ambiguous situations, as most organizational project teams are bound to face certain ambiguous situations during the life cycle of the entire project.
FCB Abu Dhabi Advertising Agency is one of the leading advertisement agencies of the United Arab Emirates. The agency has been associated with some of the biggest campaigns of the year, like those used by Coca Cola, Paper Plus, Nivea and Levi’s. The following sections of the report provides an insight into the ambiguous scenarios that project teams associated with the organization have experienced in real life and the impact of such ambiguity on the lifecycle of the project.
Foote, Cone & Belding, or FCB is one of the largest advertising networks operates globally. Headquartered at Chicago, the organization is currently owned by the Interpublic group. At present, the organization operates across 90 countries of the world, the UAE being one of the most prominent ones (Fcb.com 2016).
The FCB Abu Dhabi Advertising Agency has been in the receiving end of several awards, including the Caples, Effies, El Ojo along with those awarded at The One Show and the Cannes. In fact, the organization is well known for its genuine participation in ensuring the success of their client brands.
Khushbu, a UK based fashion line had approached the sales team of The FCB Abu Dhabi Advertising Agency with the aim of branding their products in the UAE. Kushbu is a well known fashion brand in Europe, primarily due to the unique nature of the products that they sell: perhaps it is the sole organization that sells ‘Islamic Wear’ for women, using online platforms (Khushbu.tootinglife.com 2016).
It is well known fact that women residing in the United Arab Emirates are encouraged to wear ‘Islamic Wear’, thus the interest expressed by the administrative authorities of Kushbu so as to launch their products in the country was solely based on the demands of the market (Epps and Demangeot 2013). However, the members of this project teams soon identified certain ambiguous situations that they felt should be resolved before the campaigns could be designed and launched:
1. The first and foremost issue that the project team identified was that the tagline used by Khushbu: while selling their product in Europe, Khushbu used the tagline “Even covered women care about their appearance” (Khushbu.tootinglife.com 2016). However, the project team of The FCB Abu Dhabi Advertising Agency was spilt into halves regarding the tagline to be used while launching the product line on the national television of UAE: while some of the members were against robbing off the brand of their signature tagline, yet another section was skeptical about using the same (they feared that the tagline might appear to be disrespectful towards the women residing in UAE) (Fcb.com 2016).
2. On the other hand, the project team had also identified the fact that the products launched by Khushbu were quite high (Khushbu.tootinglife.com 2016). The team was thus uncertain about the section of the population that should be targeted in the campaigning process. Besides, the pricing strategy, the un-traditional features of the ‘Islamic Wears’ designed and sold by the fashion line also required the identification of the particular section of the population that could be targeted, much before the campaigns could be designed (Pasha-Zaidi, Masson and Pennington 2013).
At the very same time, the project team were not able to cover all sections of the potential customers (top, low and mid) as campaigns of such large scale require huge budgetary funds that the authoritative heads of Khushbu were not eager to bear with (Fcb.com 2016). Thus, it can be said that the ambiguity of the project laid in the fact that in spite of Khusbu’s idea being innovative, their signature tagline, style and design were controversial and that The FCB Abu Dhabi Advertising Agency neither had the data required to identify the section of the population that could be targeted effectively.
In order to find solutions to the issues identified by the project team, the marketing team indulged in an extensive market research regarding the demand of the untraditional Islamic wears (similar to the ones designed and developed by Khushbu) among the women of the United Arab Emirates (Fcb.com 2016). Besides this, the marketing team also put efforts towards realizing whether the signature tagline of the brand would be acceptable to the UAE society. After the data collection process was completed, analytical tools were used to identify that particular section of the population that could be targeted for the purpose of campaigning. Besides this, the marketing team ultimately developed a new tagline for the fashion line with which the products were launched in the market (Epps and Demangeot 2013).
The impact of the ambiguous situation (as described in the section above), have been enlisted below:
The first and foremost point that demands mention in this context is that the fashion line of ‘Khusbu’ was finally launched in the UAE without raising any discontent or complaints from the generals mass: courtesy to the new tagline designed by the project team of The FCB Abu Dhabi Advertising Agency (Khushbu.tootinglife.com 2016).
Figure: Khusbu launched in UAE with a new tagline
(Source: Khushbu.tootinglife.com 2016)
On the other hand, the project team had identified educated women belonging to high income group families should be considered by ‘Khusbu’ as the primary target customer group in the UAE . It is worth mentioning that almost 70 percent of the students attending Universities in the UAE are women, thus, the market chosen by the project team is quite extensive and promises significant revenue collection (Pasha-Zaidi, Masson, and Pennington, 2013).
It is worth mentioning that in spite of the fact that the marketing agency was forced to conduct the survey as they had no information based on which the target market could be decided on, the data collected from the process was efficiently utilized in several other projects: the information available on the official website of The FCB Abu Dhabi Advertising Agency indicates that the campaigns designed for Olay and Nivea were largely based on the results of this particular survey (Fcb.com 2016).
The market survey made by the FCB was conducted over a period of six months, thus incurring considerable amount of cost to the fashion line. Thus increased time and budgetary requirements of the project were the primary adverse impacts of the ambiguities of the project (Gutiérrez 2014).
On the other hand, Khusbu is a renowned brand among the Muslim communities of the United Kingdom. Robbing of the brand of their signature tagline indeed forced them to build their reputation in the UAE from the scratch.
Researchers Philippo et al. 2013 are of the opinion that among very few well tested and approved laws of conducting successful projects, the fact that “Ambiguity Kills Projects” holds true for projects of all sizes, structures and domains. However, the authors have also pointed out the very fact that in spite of the large number of tools and methods available for managing projects, embracing ambiguities is still considered to be imperative.
Researcher Gutiérrez (2014) seconds their opinion by stating that the very fact that the presence of ambiguities has adverse effects on the success of projects encourages project teams to document the SMART goals of the project, to identify the risks associated with it, to define the scope of the project and to develop strategies that could be used for overcoming the uncertainties.
Thus, it can be said that while acceptance of ambiguity in projects might lead to disastrous outputs, embracing the same actually results in the utilization of methods that enables optimum management of the said projects.
In respect to the situation under consideration, the campaigns designed for ‘Khusbu’ might have been ruined completely in case the marketing team of The FCB Abu Dhabi Advertising Agency had incorrectly identified the target market (Fcb.com 2016)..
Conclusion
The above mentioned sections of the report provide an insight into ambiguities identified in one of the campaigning projects undertaken by The FCB Abu Dhabi Advertising Agency. The ambiguities have been defined in section 3, along with the measures taken by the project team to overcome it. Besides this, the impact of the ambiguous situation (both positive and negative) on the success of project have been provided in section 4, while a generalized discussion on the effects of accepting project ambiguities has been provided in section 5 of the report.
In the light of the information provided in the report, it can thus be concluded that while ambiguous situations indeed threat the success of organizational projects, the attempts and efforts made towards overcoming such uncertainties leads to the adaptation of strategies that ultimately leads to the successful completion of any project, irrespective of its size, structure or domain.
References
Epps, A. and Demangeot, C., 2013. The rainbow of diversity versus the rain of fragmentation: the futures of multicultural marketing in the UAE.Foresight-The journal of future studies, strategic thinking and policy, 15(4), pp.307-320.
Fcb.com, 2016. FCB Abu Dhabi Advertising Agency – United Arab Emirates. [online] FCB Global. Available at: https://www.fcb.com/location/abu-dhabi [Accessed 27 Jul. 2016].
Gutiérrez, E., 2014. Managing Ambiguity When Evaluating and Selecting New Ideas in Project Portfolio Management. International Journal of Innovation and Technology Management, 11(05), p.1450030.
Khushbu.tootinglife.com, 2016. Khushbu – Women’s wear, Fashion, Salsas kameez in TootingLife. [online] Khushbu.tootinglife.com. Available at: https://www.khushbu.tootinglife.com [Accessed 27 Jul. 2016].
Pasha-Zaidi, N., Masson, T. and Pennington, M.N., 2013. Can I get a job if I wear Hijab? An exploratory study of the perceptions of South Asian Muslim Women in the US and the UAE. International Journal of Research Studies in Psychology, 3(1).
Philippo, E.J., Heijstek, W., Kruiswijk, B., Chaudron, M.R. and Berry, D.M., 2013, April. Requirement ambiguity not as important as expected—results of an empirical evaluation. In International Working Conference on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (pp. 65-79). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
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