Money Bag Apparel Strategic Plan

Mission
The mission of Money Bag Apparel can be best understood in the company’s tag line: “Clothing you like Royalty.” The idea is to make every customer feel like a million dollars when he or she is wearing Money Bag Apparel without the customer having to spend a million dollars.
Vision
The vision of the company is to be making others smile while wearing affordable yet good quality clothing. Money Bag Apparel wants to be the premier clothing line for people who understand the need to look one’s finest. At the same time, people need to be able to buy clothing without spending all their money. Designer brands can run customers deep into debt. Money Bag Apparel’s vision is for everyone to feel great, look great, and not have to spend a great amount of money.
Strategy
The strategy name for this new product launch is “Tell Your Story” and it is going to be about people sharing their personal stories of how their clothing choices changed their lives. This product launch is going to be about setting the narrative in place that clothing does make a difference. It is going to focus on how everyone deserves the chance to look sharp and feel sharp so that he or she can be taken seriously in a world that is full of fierce competition. Just as Steve Jobs used personal stories about how the latest tech changed people’s lives, which created a cult following around Apple products, the “Tell Your Story” strategy is going to be a spin on the “Tell Your Truth” campaign that many people are aligning with today. This launch, however, is going to focus on what it means to actually dress well and to be appreciated for who one is. It is going to focus on how a person’s exterior can be a reflection of the interior thanks to the opportunity that Money Bag Apparel provides.
The strategy’s theme is going to be Narrative. The slogan is going to be: “You are What You Wear.” The way this strategy is going to capture attention is through images at first that will flash on a scroll: a man in a soldier’s uniform from WW2; a professor in professorial garb from the 1960s; a conductor in fine coat at the head of symphony; a worker in overalls; a coach of a basketball team. At the end of these images will come the slogan and it will then show how everyone has to show up wearing something that defines their role to others. The theme of Narrative will show how everyone has a story to tell about why they wear what they wear—from punks to clubbers to professionals to artists to celebrities. They all have a sense of style, and the strategy will include voices from everyday people explaining why they dress the way they dress and what it says about them, how it helps them to define themselves.
Who is Involved for Strategy Implementation to be Successful
The people who need to be involved for strategy implementation to be successful are the marketing team, sales reps, customer surveyors, social media influencers, and product design and development teams. All need to be working together, first and foremost so that it is known what the customer wants and needs and that knowledge is given to design and development so that the right products and services can be provided to the public.
What is next needed is that marketing works closely with social media influencers who will be on the front lines modeling the clothing and showing their followers how great the products are. The more that consumers can see the brand on real people, the more impressed they are going to be. For that reason, social media influencers are going to play a huge role in getting word out about the product launch.
Customer surveyors are also important as they are tasked with gauging customer satisfaction and finding out what customers need and want. They have to formulate the questions that will yield the right answers, and they have to inform marketing and design and development so that the right products and services are ready for launch. Marketing has to know how to bring the products and services to market—who the target market is and why they are interested in the product. Customer surveyors will be able to provide that information (Oke, Ogunsemi & Adeyelu, 2018).
Sales reps will be responsible for directing the movement of the product: how are they going to approach customers? What will be the incentive? The sales team will be focused on getting people into the store to see the product firsthand. If sales are online, they are going to be on social media driving clicks.
Management and team leaders have to be in the loop as they will be responsible for monitoring and measuring performance. Performance indicators will have to be identified ahead of time so that they can be tracked. Data will have to be collected daily and weekly so that they can make adjustments as needed.
How to Communicate with Stakeholders
Communicating with stakeholders is essential because it means getting the message to them about “what’s in it for them” with respect to the upcoming initiatives. Stakeholders include workers and consumers. Both are going to want to know why they should be motivated to care. For workers, this is where transformational leadership comes into play. Transformational leaders are those who can communicate a vision about what the company is trying to do. That vision has to be presented to workers in a logical and rational way so that they understand it and see its importance. People are logical at root and all they want is a good reason for why they should commit themselves to a project. Sometimes transactional leaders can incentivize behavior by providing some reward, but the best motivated workers are those who buy in to the mission and the vision (Buch, Thompson & Kuvaas, 2016). Transformational leaders do a great job of communicating that mission and vision to workers, motivating them to buy in, and supporting them as they make adjustments to reach that vision (Hamdani, 2018). Transformational leaders can help to overcome barriers to change and resistance and reduce strain and anxiety among workers (Diebig, Poethke & Rowold, 2017). With a new product launch it is important that leaders be able to handle this challenge and supply what is needed.
At the same time servant leaders have to be present as well. Servant leadership can facilitate transformational leadership in that it gets in good with followers who need additional attention so that they can achieve their potential (Coetzer, Bussin & Geldenhuys, 2017). Servant leaders can provide one on one time and act as mentors to workers who have questions or who need additional help overcoming certain obstacles. These leaders can work with transformational leaders to create a positive culture and more robust workforce to facilitate the implementation of the strategy initiative for product launch.
Communication Channels to Use to Ensure “Buy-In”
Social media is the premier communication channel today (Hunter, 2020). Everyone is tuned into social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, even people system-wide. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, uses Twitter to communicate to his audience worldwide and he uses internal emails to communicate internally to his workers. Sometimes emails are leaked to the worldwide audience just to show how focused the company is on meeting objectives. The key to successful buy-in is to have a two-tier strategy of communication channels. The first tier is going to be social media because this is the digital equivalent of a global bullhorn that gets the message out as far and wide as possible. It is what lets consumers know what is happening and what the company is planning to deliver.
The second tier is the internal communication channels of the company, which allows the CEO to communicate with workers to ensure that they are all aligned in terms of vision and mission and values. That is why email is so crucial because a simple message can be sent to everyone at once but only to those are connected via the internal system of communication. Some messages should stay in-house and others can be for the external public.
Each channel must come with its own message orientation. Social media messages will have to be pithy and short and focused on delivering to consumers a bright sense of the product. For workers inside the company the aim will be to deliver motivating messages that help them to want to achieve the goals that have been set out for them. The more focused and streamlined each channel can be the better it will help the company to obtain buy-in from key stakeholders system-wide.
References
Buch, R., Thompson, G., & Kuvaas, B. (2016). Transactional leader–member exchange relationships and followers’ work performance: The moderating role of leaders’ political skill. Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, 23(4), 456-466.
Coetzer, M. F., Bussin, M., & Geldenhuys, M. (2017). The functions of a servant leader. Administrative Sciences, 7(1), 5.
Diebig, M., Poethke, U., & Rowold, J. (2017). Leader strain and follower burnout: Exploring the role of transformational leadership behaviour. German Journal of Human Resource Management, 31(4), 329-348.
Hamdani, M. R. (2018). Learning how to be a transformational leader through a skill-building, role-play exercise. The International Journal of Management Education, 16(1), 26-36.
Hunter, P. (2020). The growth of social media in science: Social media has evolved from a mere communication channel to an integral tool for discussion and research collaboration. EMBO reports, 21(5), e50550.
Oke, A. E., Ogunsemi, D. R., & Adeyelu, M. F. (2018). Quantity surveyors and skills required for procurement management. International Journal of Construction Management, 18(6), 507-516.