Thriving in Competitive Global Context †MyAssignmenthelp.com

Question: Discuss about the Thriving in Competitive Global Context. Answer: Introduction Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has become a very important concept in the recent times. Due to the advancement in technology and increase in the popularity of the internet, every business is trying to make the most of this new concept. Internet and technology have not only increased the productivity of the business, but has also provided the business to develop a more personal and direct relationship with its customers. ICT can be used in almost all levels of business which include communication; both internal and external, advertisement, marketing, supply chain management, resource management and conducting competitive analysis. This report conducts a detailed analysis of how the United Arab Emirates is using the internet technology in its business environment. United Arab Emirates is a very important middle east country. The countrys main destination is Dubai, which is also known as the tourist capital of the country. Dubai is the hub for a lot of businesses and tourist activities. The destination is seen as a symbol for luxury throughout the world. This has put a lot of pressure on the economy to stay updated with the latest technology and social trends. Since the trend of media usage is growing at a very fast pace, the UAE is using this platform to improve its business recognition and efficiency (Buhalis, 2003). The report particularly focuses on the business operations of The Emirates Airlines. This airline was one of the key players in introducing internet facilities in its business operations. Emirates used social media marketing opportunities extensively in order to reach a wider customer base and encourage brand loyalty. The airline has a significant presence on the social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn. These platforms have helped the business to maintain direct contact with the customers and provide them with a personal touch in the services. The last section of the report contains some recommendations on how Emirates can incorporate the usage of internet in other aspects of the business like traffic monitoring, baggage tracking and resource management (The Emirates Group, 2017). Role of Internet in United Arab Emirates The United Arab Emirates is one of the most important countries in the Middle East when it comes to tourism. Dubai is the most important tourist destination in the UAE and hence the country has a lot of opportunities when it comes to incorporating internet in the business operations of the country. The two main industries where the country can make the most of the internet is hospitality and airline industry (Jenner, 2017). Since a large portion of the countrys population is foreign nationals, a large number of people are dependent on the internet for the purpose of information on travel, food, geographical locations and other aspects. This gives the country a huge opportunity to make the most of the internet popularity. Free trade zones have been established specifically for foreign investments in industries like IT there is great demand for web based and localized online marketing services. In light of heavy investments in telecommunications the United Arab Emirates is also one of the most connected countries in the region. The country also has the highest reported broadband Internet connectivity in the Arab world which presents a huge opportunity to start online business, advertisement campaigns, communication simplification etc. According to survey conducted by Alexa.com, the most frequently visited global sites in the UAE region were Google, Google.ae, Yahoo, Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Dubizzle.com and Twitter. Additionally, the most famous local websites included Souq.com, Gulf news, Maktoob.com, Mozook.com and Google.ae. According to Google Zeitgeists, the search trends of 2016 in the UAE included topics like UEFA Euro 2016, Rio Olympics, Pokmon Go, Ramadan, Donald Trump, iPhone SE, T20 World Cup 2016 (Mercator, 2016). Putting some light on the Search Engine Result Page language, it is a major observation that in the UAE and Dubai results are displayed in both English and Arabic. In case of industries that are highly dependent on expatriates, the majority of search volume is in English. Similarly, the industries that are dependent on the native people and other Arabs, the search volume is mostly in Arabic. The language and keywords for internet search are determined by the nature of the products and the region of promotion.Cities like Dubai, Abu Dhabi, etc. have a very popular trend of paid search advertisements. For some keywords it is observed that there is a full first page of Ad words ads both above the organic search results and to the side of the organic search results. Arabic search result pages often have more open ad space than English result pages in both highly competitive and not so competitive niches. Social Media is becoming a part of the daily routine of people all over the world and United Arab Emirates is no exception to this trend. Since Arabs highly dependent onsocial signals in order to provide updates about their business decisions, having a strong social media presence is very important to become successful in online marketing. According to a survey done by bayt.com, it was found that a company having good social media presence was able to convert up to 40% fans into its customers. 52% of the respondents said that social media had a great impact on their websites traffic (Segre, 2015). Additionally, the survey also found out that more than 65% of the surveys included people that were following the corporations online. All these statistics confirm that social media can be a very successful platform for advertising products and services and also in order to gain brand loyalty. There are several social media sites that are available in the UAE, but Facebook tends to be the l eader when it comes to the number of people having accounts on these sites. It has almost 3.6 million users from UAE. Facebook is followed by LinkedIn, which current has over 1 million users. The popularity of this site can be owed to the popularity of Dubai in terms of business hub. Mobile marketing is one of the most quickly growing online channels in the UAE; Dubai being the leader in the segment. People in Dubai have adapted to mobile technology and the number of smart phone users is growing rapidly. The UAE happens to have the lowest cell phone usage cost which makes it very cheap for the people in UAE to buy and use smart phones. Also, since the lower-middle class of the country might not have access to personal computers, smartphones become their prime channel to use the internet. Hence, having a mobile presence in paid search and organic search in the UAE can prove to be really beneficial for a lot of businesses (Team, 2014). The UAE region does not have a lot of display networks, but it still has numerous networks and sites for banner ads.. There are a few business-to-business websites in the area that charge a huge sum of amount of banner placements. Finding cheaper locations to display advertising on the business websites can be a tough task. The cause of this can also be that there are less number of medium and small scale businesses in the region that use websites and blog for promotion. The region uses blogs to discuss topics like religion, politics and technology. Even though the online display advertisement is a costly affair, yet small-medium businesses use Google Adsense in order to monetize their websites (IstiZada, 2017). Emirates Airlines and Internet Communication plays a major role in order to ensure smooth working of the business. Every organization has communication both within the organization and outside the organization. Internal communication is very important for attaining the goals of the company successfully and external communication is important to stay in touch with the customers and also to find out what the competitors are doing. The organization uses different kind of media to communicate, which is broadly categorized into Old Media and New Media. The old media include mediums like newspapers, magazines and television. The new media consists of several forms of communication that have recently been developed using technology. Social media and internet is one of the most popular form of new media. Social media includes web based or mobile operated technologies that help in making effective communication. It mainly includes blogs, social networks, online wikis, internet forums (Bhasin, 2016). Social media has also had a huge impact on the marketing and corporate communication of the airline industry. The use of social media by the airline was pioneered by airline companies such as Air France and American Airlines. The carriers have the most popular pages on Facebook. The Emirates Airline has also started using social media as a platform for marketing, communication and to manage crisis specifically in bad weather. Emirates in 2011, took the first step to get a Facebook page that marked the footprint of the airlines entry into the social media. The main objective to do so was to create an emotional and active relationship with the customers and to capture the internet savvy segment of the customers. This also helped the brand to reach a wider range of audience since Facebook had always been the most popular social media site. Facebook was seen as a platform to gain brand loyalty and easy communication with customers,, to listen to their feedback; good and bad, and to work upon the loopholes (Paypervids, 2016). The Facebook initiative also happened to be a part of the companys objectives off becoming double its existing size in a time period of five years. In the Facebook category of talking about this Emirates came in second in the used metric with 39290 compared to the winner Southwest Airline at 41035. On the Likes metric in Facebook Emirates came in fourth with 447965 likes after Southwest, Air France and Jet Blue respectively. Emirates also used other social media platforms like Twitter to increase its brand awareness and indulge in effective communication with its prospective customers. According to a survey done by Lets Fly Cheaper, a business travel expert, it was seen that social media marketing was led by Southwest airlines in the airline industry. This trend was later adopted by a lot of other airlines to get the attention of general public. Emirates currently have approximately 867.6K followers. Even though the airlines successfully incorporated social media into its marketing strategy, the company lagged behind in a number of aspects in social media presence like level of tweet engagement and volume of US followers. The company can easily improve its degree of customer engagement if it works on being more active on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. Emirates have also ventured with social media sites like LinkedIn, YouTube and Mobile phone booking to provide excellent customer experience. The airlines have several profiles on LinkedIn that include pilots, air hostesses, crew members and stewardesses. The organization has also featured a number of YouTube videos that contain the experience of various passengers who have travelled with Emirates, expressing how they have loved flying with the airline and also promoting it to other customers. Also, introducing mobile phone booking has enabled the airline to eliminate various travel agencies and partnered organizations that would get their share of commission for booking the flight. This has helped the airline in two aspects. Firstly, the company got a chance to build a direct relationship with its customers. Secondly, Emirates generated extra revenue as the commissions of third parties was excluded from the sales (Lucky, 2014). Emirates in 2014 declared that majority if its flights are equipped with WIFI and also offer the passengers the first 10MBs if data free, using which the passengers can check into their social media accounts for updates. After the exhaustion of those 10MBs, the passengers would be charged a token $1 charge for the next 600 MB. Emirates plan to update its software programming to the extent that the passengers on flight can use unlimited data free of cost during their travelling period. The airline announced that its investing over $22 million every year in order to install and operate inflight connectivity systems that would enable the passengers on the flight to have access to Wi-Fi services. Currently, all Emirates53 A380s and 28 Boeing 777s have the facility of on board Wifi. The airline is taking aggressive measures to make its entire fleet Wifi enabled. Additionally, the airline is constantly working on reducing the charges that customers have to pay in order to use internet on t he flight. During the initial three years after Emirates launched on board Wifi connectivity, more than half a billion passengers got connected to the inflight internet facility and this number is expected to keep growing since the trend of using social media is increasing with every passing day (Verlinda Lane, 2004). Industrial Benchmarking is a technique used to find out how a particular organization is doing in comparison to its rivals in the industry. The industrial benchmarking of Emmirates in comparison to KLM, American Airlines and Air France has been displayed below. This clearly shows that Emirates is definitely lagging behind in terms of the number of followers on Twitter. The airline on the other hand is leading in the section talking about this . This shows that the airline is gaining popularity and attention of the social media users for sure. In terms of Facebook likes, the company is behind KLM and Air France (Ater Orlov, 2012). These facts reveal that Emirates is surely gaining recognition in the field of social media presence, but it still has room for a lot of improvement. The company has the potential to become the leader in social media marketing and can do so by finding the loopholes in its current strategy and improve them. . Metrics Emirates KLM American Airlines Air France Facebook Likes 447,965 1,551,569 291,325 765,102 Talking About This 39,290 30,677 4,855 7,889 Twitter Followers 20,200 279,578 363,700 22,500 Conclusion To conclude I can say that the UAE presents a huge potential for internet incorporation in their business environment. The advancement in technology and increase in the popularity of internet usage provides the country and its industries a lot of opportunities to make their business operations more efficient than ever. Considering the performance of Emirates Airline in using Internet Communication and Technology (ICT) in its business processes, it an be seen that the company is doing great when it comes to using social media for the purpose of marketing and promotion. There are certain areas where the company can put the internet to use and improve the overall efficiency of its business. Some recommendations have been made in this section on how Emirates can use internet in segments other than marketing to gain a competitive edge. The recommendations states some of the methods that are already being used by some other airlines, which can also be adopted by Emirates to improve the eff iciency of its business operations. These recommendations are a follows: Emirates should make use of the internet to detect any mechanical issue. For instance, Virgin Atlantic is using Internet of Things (IoT) devices to protect the airline from any mechanical issue. The airline has produced a fleet of Boeing 787 planes and equipment that was connected via IoT devices. The enabled the airline to receive real time data that would assist in identifying and solving a mechanical issue even before it appears. This made the flying experience safer, with fewer delays and improved the overall quality of the customer experience. Emirates should also take advantage of the technology in order to provide customers with best flying experience (Hudson, 2017). Another area where Emirates can use internet is baggage tracking. Under this, the airline can help the passengers to track their baggage while being on the plane till the time they do not land and receive it. Baggage causes a lot of issues in the airline industry, in case of being lost, misplaced, exchanged or delayed. Radio Frequency Identification technology can be used by Emirates to allow passengers to keep a check on the whereabouts of their checked in luggage. The airline may also develop a mobile application that could provide the travelers with the real time location of their baggage. This would provide transparency to the customers and will also ensure a carefree travelling experience. Since the awareness about environment protection is increasing among people, every organization aims to have minimum impact on the environment. Emirates can use IoT like AirAsia Airlines in order to reduce its footprint on the ecosystem. The airline should partner with GE and could use its flight efficiency services to reduce the amount of fuel used by the airline. This would not just protect the environment, but also reduce the companys cost incurred in buying the fuel. This technology could also be used to follow clearly identified navigation routes which are found to be around 17% inefficient throughout the airline industry (Cederholm, 2014). Another area where the airline industry could make efficient use of internet is in the check-in process. Any trip to the airport requires the passengers to go through long waiting procedures that reduces the quality of their travel experience. Checking is one of those mandatory and annoying activities. Emirates can use IoT to make this process of checking-in automatic in nature. Using this, the customers can get a seat automatically after booking their ticket, 24 hours before the take-off and do not have to stand in long lines to fetch themselves a seat. The chosen seat is determined by the preferences stated by the customer at the time of booking the flight. This saves the customer from a lot of hassle during the time of travelling and assures an excellent travelling experience. Emirates can also use the latest concept of virtual reality entertainment to make the flying experience of the passengers worthwhile. For eg, Qantas Airways partnered with Samsung Electronics to introduce this concept in their flights in the year 2015. The Virtual Reality headsets offered by the airlines provided the passengers with a unique immersive experience as well as collected and transmitted various characteristics of the passengers. This enabled the airline to provide a more personalized customer experience using the data and facts collected by the virtual reality headsets (Samoglou, 2016). Emirates can use decision support systems to check the amount of traffic and bookings on the computer based reservation systems. This will enable the airline to analyze the customer behavior, performance of the partners and traffic flows. This system also helps to compare the performance of the business to its competitors and improvise accordingly. Airports and Airlines can work together using Station Control Systems to monitor connections on a hub and report on issues like crew connections, the aircraft turns, baggage and cargo connections, etc. This will enable that all processes are in line with each other and no chaos will be created wither for customers or for the airlines and airports. Emirates can also use ICT to manage its two most expensive resources which are human beings and fleet. The airline can use maintenance control systems to monitor aircraft maintenance, operational and commercial requirements. This system can assist the airline to make sure that the aircraft is in proper shape and the equipments are well maintained too. This can further help to minimize technical and mechanical glitch. These systems are often installed with e-Procurement systems that allow airlines to order parts. These also consist of engineering systems that would provide online manuals and technical support. Technical documentation management systems often create, distribute, and manage complex technical data and documents. Hence, airlines aim to maximize fleet utilization by improving maintenance, repair and overall performance of the aircraft and airline. References Ater, I. Orlov, E., 2012. The Effect of the Internet on Product Quality in the Airline Industry, Available at: https://innovation-regulation2.telecom-paristech.fr/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Ater-The-effect-of-the-Internet-on-Product-Quality-Ater-June-2012.pdf Bhasin, H., 2016. Marketing mix of Emirates airlines Emirates marketing mix, Available at: https://www.marketing91.com/marketing-mix-of-emirates-airlines/ Buhalis, D., 2003. eAirlines: Strategic and tactical use of ICTs in the airline industry, Available at: https://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/1120/1/fulltext.pdf Cederholm, T., 2014. 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