For Lululemon, a yoga and fitness retailer, 2013 was a turbulent year. Lululemon

Question

For Lululemon, a yoga and fitness retailer, 2013 was a turbulent year. Lululemon had a number of product issues and the CEO seemed to place the blame on customers rather than on the company. The following websites detail the events of 2013: Lululemon Admits Its PR Disasters Are Hurting Sales Chip Wilson, Lululemon Guru, Is Moving On Lululemon Founder Chip Wilson Issues Apology Following Thigh-Rubbing Pants Comments Using the five I's strategic analysis stages beginning on page 52 of Business, Society, and Government Essentials, write a paper analyzing how you might use the five stages to help Lululemon deal with its strategic stakeholders to avoid future public relations issues.

Explanation / Answer

Lululemon is mainly a business which has expertise in selling the yoga pants. They mainly target to the female but recently the company encountered a PR crisis which was raised due to the number of issues, The first issue was that the company was accused of producing the yoga pants which were transparent and thus these had to be recalled from the market. Apart from this, the negative sentiments were raised among the public due to the chauvinistic comments by the CEO of the company about the female body shape. This forced many buyers to look for the other brands. In order to overcome this crisis, the CEO had to ask for the public apologies that were deemed as very in sincere sparking the drop in the sales and shares of the company and CEO had to resign.

The new CEO was appointed by the company and employment of the five strategic I’s will help the company in handling the main stakeholders and not to indulge in any future PR problems.

The first strategy involved looking for the issues which resulted in the crisis. In the case, the transparent pants were the result of poor production coupled with a reactive public relation team led to the negative comments that the company faced after their CEO spoke openly in the media

Once the issue is determined, the next stage is to look for the strategic stakeholders who can be affected by the crisis faced by the company. Females customers who buy the product of the company are the direct stakeholders along with the manpower of the firm who work for the company the government and regulatory agencies that charge taxes and control the standards of the products respectively. This will also include the shareholders or investors as they have invested their finances in ensuring the success of the company.

The next stage will be to facilitate the incentives to the stakeholders and enticing them to deal the issue with the company. This will ask to improve the production of yoga pants and making it more comfortable and widening their production to accommodate plus size yoga pants, this will add a more female customer to buy the pants.

Information objective is the fourth stage which will work on changing the mentality of stakeholders about the products. This will require in-depth analysis of the issues determined in the first stage by the company. The company can communicate the strategy to improve the product to the customers. The company should come up with interactive and attractive advertisement and it will improve the image of the products. For this purpose, some celebrities can also be employed.

Interaction strategy is the last step which will make the company work with the stakeholders on one to one basis. The company can also utilize social media to get the feedback from the customers and the demanded change in the product. This will improve the sales of the products.

Thus, by implementing the above five I’s based methods, the image of the company can be improved and it will also boost the sales.

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