Knowledge Management Of Natura & Co For Personal Care

Discuss about the Knowledge Management of Natura & Co for Personal Care.

The purpose of this essay is to concentrate on a multinational company, which has adopted social media in order to improve the process of knowledge sharing, building social capital and to solve the issues of raising funds for future investment. Urban life is incomplete without social media. Most of the regular tasks are dependent on internet these days and it helps the business organisations to make a global approach. The demand of international brands are increasing as the potential customers can easily compare all the specifications of each brand over the internet. Therefore, this essay will shed light on the significance of Facebook, Twitter, and Linked-In and other social platform’s role in knowledge development and creating brand image of a particular multinational company (Dunning, John 2013). The chosen organisation for this study is Natura & Co. (Sutter et al. 2015), which is a Brazilian manufacturer and retailer of beauty and personal care products. The contemporary business environment has evolved on a large scale and it is more competitive than ever before (Sinan, Dellarocas, and Godes 2013). With the help of technological advancement, how the company can improve its business functions is going to be the agenda of this essay. Throughout this essay, an argument will be raised whether social media plays a positive role or not to improve multiple business concerns of this Brazilian company and the motto is to establish an affirmative approach.

Natura & Co. is a prominent name in cosmetic industry, though it is originated in Brazil, the company sells their product through representatives in numerous stores of more than seventy countries ( Dalmarco et al. 2015). They deals with beauty and cosmetic products strictly produced from natural ingredients. In the year of 1969, the company introduced itself and it is needless to say that they have been following unique marketing strategies to sustain in the market and retain the competitive advantage. Since 1974, the company had been practicing the business model of direct sales and in between 2006 and 2007, it started to dominate the sales of other existing cosmetic and personal care ranges like an American company, Avon. After realising the importance of the globalisation (Dunning, John 2014), the cosmetic company felt necessary needs to change their business strategy as the whole scenario of business execution was on the verge of transformation.

In order to explore the opportunities of knowledge management in the case of chosen organisation, Natura & Co., it is essential to develop a concept of KM firstly and how it works to achieve organization’s goals and objectives (Chua, YK, and Banerjee 2013). Knowledge management refers to framing of effective plans, motivating and controlling the resources and making them organised according to the organizational need. The management ensures that their knowledge related departments have been improved and employed for the betterment of company. The knowledge management process deals with creation, storage and utilization of the acquired knowledge. Knowledge management activity of an organisation (Ford, Dianne P., and Mason 2013) is the key to process and operate the system and to develop new methods as well as encourage the employees to participate in the process. The objectives of KM is to establish a set of knowledgeable employees with better practice of sharing information and with that better business decisions can be taken. Eventually, these events will lead to improved organizational behaviour along with an improved performance of the entire organisation. Globalization and the technological advancement have a strong influence on marketing scenario and the marketing strategies of multinational companies. Internet is the only variable in a world of technology based business programmes. The popularity of internet enables the business organisations to circulate knowledge globally, which makes them believe in internet as a trusted medium to implement international marketing strategies. Social networks allow the users to share their views and knowledge over various products, as they have the power to evaluate the brands by rating and reviews, company can understand the opinion of public regarding any product. These social platforms have changed (Qureshi, Sajda 2013) the process of business communications entirely. Traditional method of customer relationship management has changed as well depending on people’s behaviour and power to shape brand identity via social networks. With better and circulated knowledge comes greater brand awareness. Websites can measure the ability of potential consumers to recognise and differentiate a particular brand from existing same range of products. Therefore, it can be said social capital (Li et al. 2014) has been formed with shared information and perspectives regarding specific interests, which plays an important role in decision making while choosing a beauty product over other branded stuff. Globalization allows us to communicate, interchange our views in an easier way on social platforms (Cavusgil, Tamer, and Knight 2015). Therefore, as a mediator it has become an integral part of the life of a passionate shopper as well as a crucial factor of business predictions and profit structure. Natura & Co. was already popular for delivering best quality products and had achieved positive brand image among its consumers in countries like Argentina, Chile, Colombia, France, Mexico and Brazil. . Hence, when they had decided to explore other countries their previous goodwill as well as exclusivity worked for them really well, and they are still on growing process of gaining consumers’ trust via social networks like Linked-In, Facebook and Twitter. Facebook, Twitter itself work as promotional tools, moreover these networks estimate customers’ interest on a particular brand. Along with advertising and strategic promotion, these platforms enable customers to share their views and base on that the company acknowledges the areas of improvement and innovation (Dubos, Rene 2017).

Importance of Knowledge Management

A brand comes with a promise to deliver a certain level of customer satisfaction as it poses itself superior in the market to gain a significant amount of profit. Natura & Co. comes with range of personalised cosmetic products, which are produced with natural exotic ingredients and works towards sustainable environment. In this era of global warming and increasing pollution rate, eco-friendly products carry a special approach towards the customers. Natura & Co incorporates the campaign of eco-friendly products in an era which is suffering from environmental issues mostly, it is innovative enough as it comes with environmental cause and it can be expected that it will receive a positive customer feedback.

Yet, in order to retain competitive advantage in the market continuous process of innovation is something, which influences the existing and potential customers to buy a product. Most of the companies trust on celebrity endorsement in order to attract the attention yet Natura has always been a believer of the theory that true beauty lies in the soul and every women is beautiful in her own way. Hence, they never went for celebrities or supermodels to create their brand image and trusts on ordinary women for their advertisements. This initiative of them has been appreciated in social platforms greatly. The benefit of social networks is that it is an excellent medium to gather different perceptions and make use of positive market responses. Market responses motivate the company to adopt innovation (Leonardi, Paul M 2014) and easy communication has made the way of taking advantage of consumer’s creative responses easy. There are two traditional ways, by which any multinational company can try to develop new products and transform the nature of their services. Considering the existing issues within the organisation the company ask for assistance from well performing employees, which is called crowdsourcing and open innovation (Mount, Matthew, and Martinez 2014) is allowing outsiders to drop their competitive ideas of innovation. However, the emergence of social media has made whole process much less difficult from it used to be in past. Social media can access to people’s creativity out of the workforce of the organisation, it enables the company to realise hidden opportunities and threats with which the company is not familiar. Customers prefer to trust on those products which is safe at the same time comes with affordable price. Customers like the idea of creative dimensions maintaining the authenticity and still not going out of the budget. Natura & Co. may incorporate their wisdom with creative ideas taken from social platforms that would be able to develop an approach towards contemporary generation. Still somewhere down the line, traditional methods have proved to be more reliable when a miscommunication occurs with the workforce while handling a large-scale project and when employee efforts are not recognised as a successful performer. However, crowdsourcing can be effective only when the employee efforts are recognised and rewarded, who have played significant role to the profitability. The impact of social media in the cases of incorporating innovative ideas to modify the products cannot be denied. 

Role of Social Media in Knowledge Development and Brand Image Creation

Professional use of Twitter in the enhancement of business is popular by now (Ellison, Nicole B., Gibbs, and Weber 2015). It was initially used to maintain personal communication yet managements of multinational companies have established a successful learning network through this social platform. Through this learning chain, employees can share each other’s thought and compare their interests or there is an option of subscribing categories by using hashtags. For a company like Natura & Co., which deals with beauty products, employees can isolate and differentiate relevant tweets for them by filtering the hashtags. This is an innovative way of exchanging knowledge and views within the organisation. Recent studies have gathered much evidences how social media and technology has a vital role to play in corporate affairs. All know the usage of Linked-In as it is accessible in the labour market. It was designed as a professional networking site where professional from different backgrounds can socialize with a professional purpose. Facebook, twitter were less used by the professionals previously where Linked-In successfully used to have a corporate approach. However, the contemporary business scenario reveals a different deal. Most of the CEOs of multinationals have a professionally managed Facebook and Twitter page, which have been created to execute marketing purposes. Numerous positive responses have been received by them after accepting social media as a necessary tool for strategy implementation. Natura & Co was suffering from several issues, regarding customer satisfaction and innovation. It can be predicted that if they recruit professionals to monitor their business activities on social media as well as circulate the knowledge of their product globally; they will be able to resolve the issues and find several ways of marketing and innovation without losing their tradition. A trend has been developed among the managers and instructors of multinational companies to embrace social networks to fulfil the objectives of the enterprise. Yet, there are some believers of traditional methods of business execution, who are gradually understating the stand of these networks in this competitive business environment. While seeking for new opportunities or threats as well as acknowledging both the positive and negative feedbacks companies are growing in quality. They are continuously looking for improvement in order to satisfy their customers. Surprisingly, these platforms are working as a tool of executing all the jobs together if monitored correctly. Natura & Co is on the process of innovation. Therefore, to make successful use of all these platforms they have to be open-minded towards modern technologies as well as the development of human resource considering the role of efficient monitors of business activity over social networks is needed (Kane, Gerald C. 2015).

Crowdsourcing and Open Innovation for Product Development

However, sometimes social media is taken as a bit misleading and managers believe, this can be used only for the purpose of recreation. Still, after considering social platforms like Linked-In, Facebook and Twitter as a tool of managing the market, promoting the product, implementing marketing strategies, solving issues and finally incorporating innovations (Nguyen, Bang 2015) ; it can be concluded that Natura & Co should understand the need of transformation in their strategy to cope up with the competitive business environment. It has been mandatory for the multinational companies to adopt social media strategies for maintaining the communication both externally and internally. The entire development of the business process depends on communication as it allows the company to break the barriers of the nations. The process of integrating social capital within one organisation is increased by the adaptation of technology as it enhances the company’s ability to assume future prospects properly as well as branding the products and attaining the purpose has become much simpler than before.

References

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