Snap Inc. Company Overview
The organization can be defined as a set-up where people from various backgrounds, varied interests, and educational qualifications come together in order to work for achieving a common objective (Management Study Guide, 2018). “An act or process of organizing or of being organized is known as Organization”- Merriam Webster. Organization management helps in bringing out best from every employee in order to complete the task in the given timeframe. This report is being prepared in order to identify how an organization manages its functions to survive in the competitive market. To identify this Snap Inc. Company has been selected. The report involves three tasks which will help in identifying the management approaches and management objectives of the company.
Snap Inc. is a social media company of America which was established in 2011 with headquarter in California. In 2017, the market value of the company was US$ 824.949 million. The founder of the company is Bobby Murphy and Evan Spiegel (Nasdaq, 2018). The company offers 4 products i.e. Zenly, Spectacles, Snapchat, and Bitmoji. It was initially called as Snapchat Inc. upon its inception, but in 2016 it was renamed as Snap Inc. so that Spectacles products can be included under a single company. The company operates as a camera company in the U.S. The Snapchat product of the company is a camera application which helps individual to interact with images and short videos. It also offers Camera, which is a tool used to add and personalize context to the Snaps (Reuters, 2018). It involves a Friends Page that allows making and watching stories, making voice, chatting, and video calls and interacting with a wide range of related stickers and Bitmojis (Bloomberg, 2017). Besides this the scope and scale of the company can be explained by the data which reflects that the whole world is not using the products of Snap Inc. yet but approx. 100 million people use it daily, and worldwide there are approx. 200 million active users (Newberry, 2018). The number of the user of Snap Inc. products is increasing, therefore it can be said that there is huge scope for company to grow and increase the worldwide users.
From last six years, the organizational structure of the company has an important role in its long-term strategies. The company began at the time when Evan Speigel CEO of Snap, came together with his classmates, Bobby Murphy, who is now the Chief Technology Officer of the company, also the co-founder of Snapchat app. Still, the company is being handled by the two founders with 5 executive officers. As per the information the company had 1,859 employees in December 2016. For achieving diversification and growth an organizational culture has been built which is diverse yet inclusive. The company’s main aim of going public is to retain and attract highly talented people, including product managers, software engineers, and designers. They compete for talent by developing a culture of functioning hard to make great experiences and products and permitting employees to have a contribution to the exciting and new projects (Matthies and Parvin, 2018).
Organizational Structure
The team and talent oriented structure of Snaps has always supported company to be successful in its mission of developing and expanding. Every feature of the operation of the company from the development of the product, to its legal obligations and financial aspects, are structured with extremely experienced and skilled officers’ who help in making good decisions. The company’s organizational structure has been fruitful; however, it has to deal with some criticism because of its inclusive nature and heavy structure.
The system approach is established on the simple concept that everything is inter-dependent and inter-related. A system is the collection of the dependent and related element which when in interaction forms a unitary whole. It is basically a combination and collection of parts making complex whole. The important feature is that it is formed of the hierarchy of sub-systems (Kühl, 2014). In turn, each industry and company is composed of various systems and sub-systems so as Snap Inc. such as marketing, accounting, finance, and so on.
This approach will be the best approach that will suit the nature of the company and can be adopted in the business easily.
- This approach helps in increasing the adaptability of the organization to environmental changes. The organization is considered as a whole and not by its parts. This allows it to adapt to the environment needs. Verdicts are given by analyzing the micro as well as the macro environment.
- Consistency in the process of decision making so that no particular field gets special treatment (Ghonaimy, 2014).
- The emphasis is on accomplishing the organization’s individual and overall goals.
- Does not provide specific functioning style in the organization.
- The arrangement of the interrelationships has to be performed appropriately or else it might be counterproductive.
- It may not be always appropriate for smaller organizations. The model assumes that maximum of the organizations is complex, open systems, and big.
Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy are the ones who established Snap Inc. in the year 2011 in California, the U.S. In 2016, the company changes its name to Snap Inc. and revealed its eyeglasses product known as Spectacles. Along with this in this year company filed its document for IPO (Initial Public Offering) with a projected value of $25-35 billion. In 2017, the company announced its international headquarter in London. As of February 2018, 95% of the combined voting power is with both the founders (Snap Inc., 2017).
Besides so many ups and downs and changes in the business, the culture of the company was consistent which helped them in attaining the success in the competitive market. Snap Inc. has an expressive internal culture which is apparently based on “humanity”. Apart from a program which is implemented to support team members financially who are going through adverse circumstances, the company also arrange some sessions of group therapy for its employees and a charity division that provides funds for education, youth campaigns, and fund arts(Econo Times, 2018).
The Snapchat use a ghost for its logo because whatever is posted or texted on the Snapchat gets disappear after some time (24 hours) (Douglas, 2016). Further, the offices of the company are dispersed throughout the area which provides conveyance to the employees as they can reach to the offices easily.
System Approach
Source [https://www.professionalacademy.com/blogs-and-advice/marketing-theories—explaining-porters-five-forces]
Porter Five Forces is a complete strategy framework that makes a strategic decision by not just analyzing the current competition. The focus of Porter Five Forces is on the Snap Inc.’s method of building a viable competitive advantage in Service industry and Internet Software. This framework can not only be used by the company’s manager for creating a strategic position in the service industry but also can help in exploring profitable opportunities in the technology sector.
New Entrants in the market bring new and innovative ideas, new methods of pursuing business which in turn put pressure on Snap Inc. by pricing strategy, offering a new value proposition and reducing costs to the customers (Fern Fort University, 2018).
In order to face all these challenges of new entrants, the company has decided to rebuild its Android app to optimize performance. Due to improved performance of the app new customers have joined the company. Android App’s new version will be launched in the selected market.
Every company in the service industry purchase the raw material from various suppliers. Suppliers in central position can reduce the margins that can be earned by the Snap Inc. in the market. The company can handle this aspect by making well-organized supply chain which involves multiple suppliers.
Most of the time buyer’s demands are high. They are always willing to purchase the best service by paying minimum price. This puts the profitability of Snap Inc. in pressure. If the customer base is small yet powerful then the bargaining power of the customers becomes high and forces company to offer discounts.
The company can tackle this aspect by increasing its customer base. It will provide two benefits to the company i.e. it will help in decreasing the customer’s bargaining power and it will offer a chance to the company to rationalize its production and sales process.
The profitability of the industry suffers when a new service meets the existing needs of the customers in a different way. For instance, Google Drive and Dropbox are the substitutes for storage hardware drives.
Snap Inc. has taken step to tackle this problem is by simplifying its Snapchat product because they identified from the feedback of the customers that customers feel difficulty in using this application.
If there is intense rivalry among the existing companies in the market then it will lead to decrease in the prices which will result in decreasing the industry profitability. Snap Inc. Company functions under extremely competitive market of service and software industry. This competition decreases the overall profit of the company.
To deal with this competition company can collaborate with its competitors such that market size of the company can be increased.
Conclusion
The above report has provided a brief overview of the Snap Inc. Company and its organizational structure which has helped the company in sustaining in the market for the long run. A modern management approach i.e. System approach has been explained along with its benefits and drawbacks in order to identify its use in the company. Besides this, a Narrative input chart story has been projected by using three elements of Johnson & Scholes cultural web framework i.e. Stories, Rituals and Routines and Symbols. In the end, two innovative strategic management objectives of Snap Inc. have been identified by using Porter’s five forces framework i.e. Rebuilding the Android app to optimize performance and Simplifying the way of using Snapchat.
References
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Douglas, D. (2016) Why did Snapchat decide on using a ghost for their logo? [online]. Available from: https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Snapchat-decide-on-using-a-ghost-for-their-logo [Accessed 13 March 2018]
Econo Times (2018) Snapchat’s IPO Reveals “Unique” Company Culture, Houses As Office, Future Plans [online]. Available from: https://www.econotimes.com/Snapchats-IPO-Reveals-Unique-Company-Culture-Houses-As-Office-Future-Plans-523186 [Accessed 13 March 2018]
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Ghonaimy, M.A.R. (2014) Systems Approach for Development. Netherlands: Elsevier.
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Management Study Guide (2018) Organization Management – Meaning, Need and its Features [online]. Available from: https://www.managementstudyguide.com/organization-management.htm [Accessed 13 March 2018]
Matthies, N. and Parvin, S. (2018) An Evaluation of Snap Inc. and its Recent Decision to Go Public [online]. Available from: https://www.umflint.edu/sites/default/files/groups/Research_and_Sponsored_Programs/SRC/2017/n.matthies-s.parvin.pdf [Accessed 13 March 2018]
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