Boomin’ Brands Inter-organizational Relationships Essay Prompt This section should include a proposal of at least 2 inter-organizational relationships (i.e., partnerships), each with a different stakeholder group. Each relationship should tie to one of the strategies proposed in PR 4, and this should be explicitly stated. You must include the name of a specific company or […]
This section should include a proposal of at least 2 inter-organizational relationships (i.e., partnerships), each with a different stakeholder group. Each relationship should tie to one of the strategies proposed in PR 4, and this should be explicitly stated. You must include the name of a specific company or organization you plan to partner with. Each relationship should be specific and actionable.
Portfolio of Brands:
The strengths of Bloomin’ Brands are providing various quality food options and outstanding customer service with a relaxed atmosphere. These success elements associated with the company target both families and general consumers. Also, Bloomin’ Brands are customer-friendly to guests who are vegan, vegetarian, or allergic to specific ingredients based on customized food choices. On the other hand, free training lessons for employees to improve their skills is one of the company's strengths. Bloomin’ Brands offers employee insurance, free or discounted meals and a health care-on restaurant or onsite. The company’s stakeholders will not have to worry about high insurance charges and be able to achieve future career success through company training programs. Those benefits provided by Bloomin’ Brands help to maintain talented employees and keep employees’ loyalty with a low turnover rate. Besides, the company has a digital innovation team to drive more customers to the restaurants. It is a way of satisfying the customer’s needs to build a strong relationship and increase food sales by using eCommerce websites. The company can reduce food waste and create seasonal or new menu items by looking at customers’ dish preferences from the digital innovation team’s data.
The weakness of Bloomin’ Brands is profitability - it is considerably lower than its competitors. The company’s financial growth is stable, and can pay short-term debts. However, Bloomin’ Brands is lower on average net profit margin and current ratio than other competitors. Besides, David Deno is the CEO of Bloomin’ Brands. He has more than 15 years of experience in finance and operation positions, but he only has 2 years experience with Bloomin’ Brands, which may mean his decision-making process might compete with other stakeholders. It is necessary to build strong relationships with the staff and suppliers to maintain team trust and loyalty. Another weakness is that products and services are not unique from other competitors. For the company to become outstanding in the restaurant industry, special attention is needed to create seasonal menu items and determine the majority of customers’ food preferences. Kindly ask guests to complete dining experience surveys through innovation and technology implementation will become a competitive advantage for Bloomin’ Brands to move forward.
The opportunity for Bloomin’ Brands is to introduce new and healthier dishes. To enlarge the customer demographic, Bloomin’ Brands releases dishes that combine plant-based menu items to satisfy the demand. At the same time, the idea also satisfied customers who cared about sustainability within the business. The society trend is changing to prefer diet and healthy options. Customers are more likely to purchase or consume healthy food. On the other hand, installing self-service technology can increase service flexibility and efficiency. Ordering food on touch-screen kiosks helps the company collect data on customers’ average spending and reduces waiting time for service requests from the server. To provide employees with a safe working environment, Bloomin’ Brands offers training courses on sexual harassment, drug abuse, stealing and health violations. The employees are responsible for protecting themselves and reporting sexual harassment situations in the workplace.
The threats of Bloomin’ Brands would be time and money consumed while promoting plant-based menu items in international segments. The plant-based menus are popular nowadays; however, developing a new dish and upselling might take about 2 to 3 years to see the results. On the other hand, the setup and maintenance for the self-ordering machine or table tablet are expensive. The company needs to consider the risk of inability to return on investment. When the machine breaks down, it is possible to lose customers’ personal information and company data. If the training program does not train properly or ignores certain conduct, which leads to costly and legal claims, this would result in unsatisfactory employee rates and reviews. It will end up with a high turnover rate and staff shortage.
Regarding the strategies used to implement the SWOT analysis, the following elements are paired to provide realistic and suggestive strategies to overcome the value of each section. For the S-O strategy, focusing on Bloomin’ Brand's strengths and opportunities, it would be best to promote digital innovation to strive for more revenue and an influx of customer appeal. As the brand has a digital innovation team, it would be beneficial to utilize it to develop new concepts and ideas to bring in more service through what is trending in the digital world via QR codes or social media. Another strategy would be to provide free online training programs that are easily accessible for all employees anywhere in the world. Doing so can benefit both the employees and the brand by ensuring employees are properly trained and receive a reward for their efforts. The innovation team can incorporate the training program through a link or QR code within the Human Resources handbook during training so employees can have direct access to the program website.
The W-O strategy utilizes the brand’s weaknesses and opportunities to reinforce some strengths that can be used to help further assist the company. One strategy would be to provide trendy and healthy dishes to promote market activity and revenue. Not only will this appeal to a wide range of market consumers, but it will also make the brand seem new and appealing by incorporating inclusivity in its marketing approach. Providing healthy meals does not mean they need to seem bland or boring, by providing a new perspective on healthy meals by making them seem appealing, vibrant and fresh can help further increase revenue sales while introducing new and healthier options within the company. Another strategy would be to provide online training through free meeting programs such as zoom, Webex, google meet, etc. In doing so, meetings can be held anywhere and are freely accessible. Due to the lack of firm-employee relations, the CEO can personally interact with the employees through the online meeting platform to discuss more the company and how the employees are an important part of the team by making them feel valued and needed for increasing work morale and quality.
For the S-T strategy, the brand will stress the importance of proper training through multiple training incentives and reward each session with benefits such as insurance, health care, and other positive elements. The employee will apply their skills by taking a short quiz after each training session and receive a certificate that needs to be signed by management personnel to confirm and verify that the employee did indeed learn and apply the information. Once acknowledged, employees can receive their benefits as a reward and will continue to have this type of training monthly to ensure consistency and effectiveness over time. Another strategy would be to utilize the digital innovation team to promote plant-based menu items with free services and programs to save on expenses while still providing visibility to its market. Utilizing social media is a great way to provide word-of-mouth skills to spread information further and promote the company. Providing a free QR code incorporated in menus to feature promotional items would be another way to increase revenue or utilise recycled materials and stamps to create flyers and posters by saving time, energy and money overall as a whole. The brand can also promote using recycled materials to help the environment and appeal to new groups. By understanding the brand’s strengths and threats, we can use the brand’s strengths and team to create new ideas and concepts to diminish the financial, economic, and timely threats.
For the W-T strategy, the brand can train employees to upsell alcohol and products when serving guests at restaurants. One of the brand's main weaknesses is low profitability, and a threat is not being able to train the employees properly. By having a solid and consistent training program, the brand can incorporate the concept and importance of upselling to increase revenue while at the same time ensuring proper training by making sure employees want to learn about the company and what benefits they can receive, such as a rewards incentive. The brand can promote an employee of the month award for the individual that can upsell the most items by the end of the month, increasing the motivation and effort of the employees in return for any bonus pay or other incentives. Another strategy would be to have the CEO personally attend in-person training sessions, as one of the brand's weaknesses is a low firm-employee relationship. Without this relationship, it is difficult for employees to maintain morale and motivation as it seems like the company does not care about their employees individually. By having a proper firm-employee relationship, the CEO can listen to the needs and requests of his employees and show his dedication to his team. The CEO can also provide a backstory on his company to the employees and why he started it in the first place by providing his mission, vision and objective statements. Have the CEO train the employees in a group session when he can and have a step-by-step guide on how certain systems work to help employees understand how legal claims can affect both the company and its employees. Provide a personal relationship with each individual to create a sense of inclusivity by reestablishing trust through the brand’s mission and vision.
In conclusion, these strategies can be utilized to help view each section as an improvement for the brand. By providing ideas and suggestions to tackle each weak point in the sections of the SWOT analysis, the company can focus on areas that need more attention and apply them to benefit the brands.
1. Reduce food wastes
2. Implementation of interactive self-service technology
2. Expansion to Novel Markets
In business, companies establish inter-organizational relationships to support their strategic objectives and refine their operations processes. Such associations allow business organizations to work together in symbiotic relationships while preserving their autonomy and competitiveness. They often take the form of partnerships, project groups, or outsourcing (Agostini & Nosella, 2019). A Business organization may also create trade associations and form marketing alliances with other businesses to share resources effectively, discover new production methods, and advocate for fair governmental regulation and competition by other firms. Such relationships are praised for optimizing the effectiveness of supply chain management as organizations maintain communication and depend on each other to deliver products and services to customers effectively. Being one of the world’s largest casual dining companies Bloomin’ Brands, Inc. establishes multiple relationships with other organizations in the strive to support its strategic and market objectives. This study investigates how inter-organizational relationships between Bloomin’ Brands and other firms could support the company’s productivity. Bloomin’ Brands should establish inter-organizational relationships with Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Wondersauce to support its marketing initiatives and refine its operational strategies.
Bloomin’ Brands, Inc. should establish a marketing alliance with Tampa Bay Buccaneers to support its marketing initiatives. The collaboration between the two companies would improve football fans’ experiences by providing them with delicious meals as they watch football matches. The long-term association ought to include marketing rights that could allow Tampa Bay Buccaneers to promote Bloomin’ Brands’ products and its portfolio of restaurants, which include Carrabba’s Italian Grill, Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse, Bonefish Grill, and Outback Steakhouse. Through the association, Bloomin’ Brands could adopt a target marketing strategy to engage Tampa Bay Buccaneers fans and intentionally stimulate demand for and purchases of its products to increase brand awareness and sales. On the other hand, Tampa Bay Buccaneers could receive greater public recognition as its fans enjoy various benefits from Bloomin’ Brands. For example, Bloomin’ Brands could offer gifts to a specified number of guests who purchase soft drinks through Curbside Takeaway at any of its restaurants. The inter-organizational relationship would, therefore, support Bloomin’ Brands’ relationship marketing initiatives.
Bloomin’ Brands, Inc. should also establish a strategic digital partnership with Wondersauce. To ensure competitiveness in the digital era, Bloomin’ Brands should establish an online strategy that ensures a responsive customer relations management system and competitive digital marketing strategies. To achieve this goal, the company needs to partner with a digital advertising agency such as Wondersauce. As a digital advertising agency, Wondersauce works across key campaign initiatives for its partners, such as websites and mobile strategies. While the lack of an effective self-service technology constitutes one of Bloomin’ Brands’ weaknesses, the company must collaborate with Wondersauce to create innovative physical experiences involving online reservations and digital payments. Due to rapid technological advancement taking place in the contemporary world, customers tend to demand more self-service attributes to the casual and fine dining experience (Xu, Jeong & Baiomy, 2021). Bloomin’ Brands needs to collaborate with Wondersauce to streamline its method of service delivery and achieve greater customer satisfaction. By utilizing such technologies, the company could also accrue strategic flexibility as it gains the capability to identify major changes in the external environment and effectively respond to the competitive strategies adopted by rivals. Bloomin’ Brands’ partnership with Wondersauce could bring multiple benefits to the company’s operational strategies.
By creating strong inter-organizational relationships with Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Wondersauce, Bloomin’ could achieve more efficient relationship marketing and operational strategies. Through its collaboration with Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the company could achieve greater brand recognition and loyalty among members of the public. Similarly, Bloomin’ Brands’ relationship with Wondersauce could help respond to trends in consumer preferences, which could increase sales and support the company’s strategic objectives.
Agostini, L., & Nosella, A. (2019). Inter-organizational relationships involving SMEs: A bibliographic investigation into state of the art. Long Range Planning, 52(1), 1-31. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0024630117305083
Xu, Y., Jeong, E., & Bailey, A. E. (2021). Enjoyment, convenience or both? Investigating key attributes for consumers to use interactive self-service technology in restaurants. Anatolia, 1-4. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13032917.2021.1890627
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Published On: 01-01-1970
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