Public relations campaign strategies and implementation

¶ … strategic off shoring can have dramatic consequences upon marketing and public relations efforts. Whirlpool's current decision to leave their strategic positioning within the United States for Mexico implies an implicit effect upon their Whirlpool marketing function. The current public relations plan to lower backlash for the off shoring of base operations to Mexico will impact their marketing efforts in several ways. First, it will create negative dissonance within their marketing efforts based upon the fact that they will be confusing the audience with various messages. Second, they will negatively impact marketing efforts by changing the focus away from the product towards their management decisions. Both of these functions are inevitable and the only way to deter current problems associated with their off shoring is to critically analyze their PR so as to minimize the social dissonance.

The impact of their PR campaign is substantial, there are several cost figures that will go into this overall consideration. Since they want to reduce the amount of overall damage to their company name, they need to convince the American public that they are still an "American company." Whirlpool's marketing strategy hinges on their credibility as a reliable provider and a high profile American company. With this strategic move and offshoring of their production, they can longer claim to have all of their products fully assembled within the United States. Their public relations efforts will be an attempt to decrease overall consumer ambivalence towards their move and to convince them that they are still an American brand. The Marketing function will be severely impacted because they have to completely change their overall marketing strategy. At the same time, regardless of their marketing function, the majority of their consumer recognition will be associated with their public relations play. As a result, they temporarily subsumes the function of marketing in general. This implies that in order for Whirlpool to succeed within the U.S. market, they will have to conduct simultaneous PR and marketing efforts to maintain consumer confidence by ensuring that they are still an American engineered company and that their productions will continue to meet high standards of quality and accessibility. If both of these considerations can be fully accounted for their they have a chance of maintaining their market share.

Although this move will be cost effective and dramatically reduce the overall production costs of their company, it will have many ethical considerations attached as well. Their layoff of American employees, as well as the closing of plants will impact the local and regional economies in which they reside. If they were to do so callously it would be considered by many to be unethical treatment of their labor force, where many of their employees have been life time employees. Several steps can be taken to ensure that the needs of their employees will be met in the long-term despite any damaging impact of their business operations. The first step will mandate that they provide generous compensation packages in the short-term to provide employees with either early retirement packages or unemployment compensation. This will ensure that their employees have the adequate time and money needed to secure another position. Second, Whirlpool must provide re-education training through grants and institutions to allow their employees the opportunity to retrain their skills to fit another position. This will allow them the flexibility to learn new skills and engage in more challenging work, while still receiving compensation through their severance packages. If these two steps are carefully taken, then Whirlpool will meet their ethical responsibilities.

Not only does Whirlpool have to be concerned from an ethics perspective, they also have to understand the implications from a technology perspective. Patented technology is the lynchpin of Whirlpool's success, and intellectual property protection within Mexico is much less stringent than within the United States. Since they are employing a labor pool from the Mexican economy, technological leakage could become a serious problem. This is a noted problem that has impacted major companies that have off shored or outsourced operations overseas. Boeing for instance lost some of its patented technology advantage to China and India due to their production facilities there in the late 1990s. Whirlpool must ensure that their core intellectual properties are protected institutional and security barriers.

By expanding on an international level, Whirlpool dramatically reduces their costs but also ensures additional competition in the long run. They have taken this step in order to decrease their upfront assembly costs, but it also invites competition from a globalization perspective. By leaving the country themselves, yet still targeting the United States market share, Whirlpool implicitly takes less pressure away from legislative protection of the U.S. marketplace to foreign goods. This is because the U.S. no longer has an incentive from an economic protectionist stance of protecting Whirlpool's market share once Whirlpool does not have direct employees within the United States. As a result, foreign competition, especially from China could very well subsume the entire market share of Whirlpool within a few years. Although they have moved their plant to Mexico, their production costs will always exceed that of Chinese and Asian competitors. This move could very well lose them both their credibility as an "American made" product line, while at the same time also lose out in a price inflation environment. From a global perspective, there are many different considerations for their public relations strategy.