Pandora Radio

Pandora Radio

Introduction
Pandora Radio has quite a severe problem regarding market penetration along with maintaining the customer base. There are a number of implications behind the high customers’ bounce rate and hence, reduced sales drive. In order to mitigate those problems, SWOT analysis was conducted to assess basic weaknesses and threats to the firm together with external environmental implications. This paper will provide a number of coherent generic strategies that can contribute towards the formation of grand strategy. This paper would also look for the most optimum value discipline considering Pandora Radio’s perspective. Hence, the core focus of the paper is to enhance the development of various strategies that targets customer’s base development as well as the formulation of different technical aspects as part of their infrastructure.

Strategic Development and Management
Value discipline is one of the most vital tools in crafting the next plans and decisions taken by the company’s management. Hence, it includes cultivation of whole company from the development of its basic competencies to the enhancement of culture in an organization. Based on the company’s current weaknesses, it should have to follow the value discipline of customers’ intimacy. This specific discipline deals with the development and subsequent assessment of different alternatives for improving customer’s perception by targeting specific customer base. Pandora Radio has customers belonging to certain demographic regions of United States, China, and Australia.

However, the development of much better services can allow the company to diversify its products and hence, enhance their specific targeted markets to surrounding regions of Canada and Europe (Treacy and Wiersema, 1993).
For achieving this milestone, Pandora Radio should have to dedicate enough resources for the enhancement of their range of services. Spotify and VEVO are two of the fiercest competitors of Pandora Radio and have occupied the substantial targeted market. For coping up with that, Pandora Radio should have to use the strengths of those competitors and use them for its own advantage, which includes the development of better internet infrastructure for swift services under cost effective domains. One of the most vital steps in developing the generic strategy includes a focused differentiation of services. Pandora Radio should have to develop and diversify its services by providing online video streaming and successful integration of them with different social media websites and most importantly, options for iTunes downloads right from their songs library. Surely, these steps provide the company to coup up with the development of potential advantages that its competitors enjoy at this moment. Hence, the company should have to emphasize on focus strategies that are particular to the specific niche markets together with developing core understanding behind marketing dynamics, financial issues, and customers’ needs and purchasing power. Based on those components, the generic strategy should have to be devised that can allow better market penetration and low-cost alternatives for the customers at large. By providing audio and video music tracks to numerous customers in the targeted region would allow the company to place themselves in the market thereby leading to strong brand loyalty (Chaudhuri and Holbrook, 2001). The strategy should have to be differentiation focused and allows better options to the customers. Development of differentiated and more importantly, innovative services would allow the consumers shift towards Pandora Radio (Dash and Saji, 2008).
In the continuation of generic strategy, the long term strategy would include both cost effective as well as services differentiation outlooks together with enhancement of marketing outlooks. As part of services, Pandora Radio should have to provide different recommended music for the users and allow them to create playlists and should have to allow customizing their preferences. Apart from that, the integration of car audio should also have the features of gesture recognition in order to allow drivers the best experience of music on the road. The development of many other innovative features would allow the firm to enhance their outlooks on financial as well as marketing grounds (Porter, 2008).
Pandora Radio can also harness the power of social media websites; like, Twitter and Facebook. This initiative would provide the company with strong online presence and hence, much better customers’ base. Another important way for enhancing the customers’ perception includes the provision of high-quality audio and video buffering at all networks and not limited to IPTV (Internet Protocol Television). Surely, it can be provided with some extra charges because the development of such services would require a substantial amount of financial capital at the beginning (Hoffman and Fodor, 2010).
Sales savings should also be provided to the most valued customers at first, and it would have to be expanded to other consumers too. It can lead to the development of strong brand loyalty and developing two-way relationships between the firm and the customers. It can also lead the firm to get much more customers to enhance their outlook towards the company. American and Australian societies are highly diversified and multi-faceted. In order to get consumer’s demands, dedicated channels in the very own native language of other minorities can also enhance market penetration and would open doorways towards moving with those countries afterwards (Jamal, 2003).
Music libraries are another major drawback of the firm because it does not provide a substantial collection of music and programs’ recordings. Pandora Radio should have to enhance its collection of music from different artists and allow swift options for any anomaly in the playlist and/or songs. In this manner, the company can take the help from the customer to enhance their services. Also, in this domain, different surveys should have to be conveyed that can allow assessment of customers’ perception and taste about different songs. Most importantly, it can also serve to enhancing the video and audio music libraries at Pandora Radio’s disposal. This step can also allow the customer with a sense of development and hence provision of better services. Surely, it is not limited to scare media resource; the company does not have alliances with any of the great media houses for music production. Media houses, like, Virgin Records, Universal Music and EMI, can serve the company thousands of dollars as part of purchasing the license of those files. Also, it allows the provision of excess resources that entertainment savvy customers’ appreciate that includes sneak peek previews, pre-release teasers, and most importantly, trailers of games and movies. These alternatives not only allow the firm to gain the competitive advantage against their competitors but also enhance the customers’ base by providing the users with new options. Pandora Radio has a sound infrastructure; however, it lacks the integration of different services. The firm can also look forward towards different advancements including the option of live streaming that is quite commonly provided on YouTube. It would also enhance the firm’s net worth and allow people from almost every interest to have their very own playlists and most importantly, their very own personalized collection of music that is readily shared on any of the social networking websites. Further designing and development of different plugins thereby leading to enhanced user interface (UI) experience for the customers at large (He and Balmer, 2006).
Surely, the company is quite a famous one in terms of its name and hence, enjoys a number of different fruits. The firm should have to focus on managing the resources and can have resources from other sister companies of Pandora Media Inc. This would not only allow the firm to allocate its financial needs without borrowing amount of money from any other banking organization and would allow the firm to get viable and in operations in case of any anomaly in the planning and/or external environmental conditions (Cheong, Choo, and Lee, 2010).
Besides these basic strategies, it is of substantial importance that the company would look forward towards change management strategy as well. This will provide the company to go through such massive changes as part of the organization with the lesser hassle and most importantly, conflicts. The top management would be responsible for communicating all the aspects of the strategies to the grassroots level and provide realistic approach of the benefits after the development of such changes as part of organization (Todnem By, 2005).
Conclusion
All in all, Pandora Radio has numerous grounds for improvement on marketing and technical grounds. Also, the formulation and implementation of above strategies would allow the company to enhance its sales targets along with the reduction in bounce rate of consumers. Moreover, the firm can also provide more lucrative remuneration package to different customers. Nevertheless, the firm should look for different aspects of continual improvement as part of their company and hence allow better development of various aspects considering technical and marketing domains.

References
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