Ford Motor Company is an American publicly trading company which manufactures automobiles. It sells cars and commercial vehicles under two main brands, Ford and Lincoln for luxury cars. The company came into existence as of June 16, 1903. Today, it covers most countries in the world. The company’s vision is to make people work together as a lean global enterprise for automotive leadership; its mission is to have one team, one plan, and one goal. Thus, it measures its leadership by the degree of satisfaction of its customers, investors, suppliers, and employees.
Analysis, Composition and Evaluation
The main purpose of the company is to provide manufacturing, servicing, financing and marketing Ford cars. The company’s accessories, parts, vehicles and other equipment are sold through a wide range of dealers and distributors in various countries. The company sells it vehicles to commercial fleet customers, daily rental cars corporations, and government (Cao, Myers, and Omer). It also provides service contracts to dealers and customers. The company has various intellectual patents worldwide.
As for the financial sector, the company provides financial services through its owned subsidiary known as FORD Motor Credit Company LLC, or directly Ford credit. This credit avails automotive financing products to and through automotive distributors and dealers worldwide. The main share of this company’s credit comprises the financing of the company’s vehicles and extending support to the traders. The company gets its revenue from the payment that is made under the retail installment sales and lease contracts, which accrue from the purchases, support payments from the company, interest rates, and subsidiaries.
The company’s strength is a geographically diversified revenue stream. A large amount of this endeavor’s revenue comes from North America, where there is an established market. It is approximated that about 52% of the Ford revenue comes from this area. Moreover, outside the domestic market, the company also has a well-diversified revenue stream as compared to its competitors.
The company’s has good opportunities to grow and expand through market penetration. This is because it employs improved marketing techniques and engages more distributors and dealers. With this, an opportunity appears to improve its financial standings through expanding its supply so as to achieve better economies of scale and reduce the production of costs (“Reception Booster). This further gives the company a competitive advantage over its rivals, since it can produce its products at a lower cost than the other players in the market.
Ford Company has also a good sustainability strategy through its quality control management, which ensures that there are no mistakes in the manufacturing process (West). This shows high safety standards of the company, as the company is building its reputation for safe vehicles.
However, Ford Motor Company has faced some major threats as well. For instance, it is slow in adopting the innovations. The scope of its production network combined with the present competition level, when not addressed appropriately, may lead to its failure. Rapid and aggressive innovation strategies are needed to curb this problem so as to remain in the market for a long time. The company is also faced with the threat that its inventories are not adequately monitored due to its large size. This inability will directly affect the financial capability of the company which may result in substantial losses.
The Importance of Social Media
Due to stiff competition in the market, every organization devices new ways to reach its customers and attract more potential clients. Recently, the Internet and social media have become one of the best ways through which the business entities advertise their products. This is because it brings people of different ages, cultures and status together, making it thereby a good point for advertisement.
With many people using the social media channels across the world, it has emerged as one of the powerful marketing and communication channels helping to raise and restore the company’s brands through directly connecting with the consumers. Social networking enables viral marketing and word of mouth promotion to be highly useful, since it gives a greater percent of consumer’s engagement. In the modern world, almost everyone is using the Internet and can view various products online. This makes it cheaper for the organization to reach their targeted audience (Carpenter and Lertpratchya). In the recent years, Ford Motor Company has employed the most sophisticated use of media, since they understood that it is not enough to just set up an account and post generic items once or twice a week, but intensive engagement of the customers in airing what they think is necessary.
In the year 2009, Ford Motor Company launched an innovative and a low-cost social media campaign on Facebook. This program was aimed at attracting young and newly qualified drivers to purchase the new, redesigned Ford Fiesta. This program was known as Fiesta Movement. The company invited a large number of people to apply to become Fiesta Agents. The successful applicants would be loaned new model Fiesta for six months in return for giving an honest post about the car on various social media. The application was made through Youtube, and one was required to explain why he or she wants to be a Fiesta agent.
As a result of this movement, the company gained over two million new Facebook and Twitter fans and over 50,000 requests for information about the new brand Fiesta and how it works. This movement was very successful for several reasons. First of all, the company used the guerrilla marketing techniques to capture the social media awareness. This generated a lot of anticipation among the consumers, hence attracting the attention of the society to the new brand in the market and making the customers experience the brand first hand.
The social media aids in increasing the loyalty of the customers to the company’s brand (Chu, Kamal, and Kim). This is because the customers want to interact with people and are not interested in the product features. With the help of social media, consumers are able to engage in a dialogue with characters, which helps in building trust. This calls for using the social media to interact with customers and not to announce the new products. A ty