Leo Burnett Company Case Analysis

The Leo Burnett Company (LB) is a reputable and successful advertising company that has managed to establish itself as a global leader in advertising through innovative thinking and collaborative creativity. In this particular case LB has obtained a very important advertising contract from Ontann Beauty Care (OBC), a company of whom LB has a good business relationship with through numerous years of providing advertising services for OBC. OBC is introducing a new product into the global market so LB is under a lot of pressure to make this advertising campaign a success. LB has many global offices but is based out of the U.K. This project is geared towards introducing OBC's new product line in the Taiwanese and Canadian markets. The product introduction went well in Taiwan but did not go over so well in the Canadian market. Janet Carmichael, the global account director and head of the project, is faced with some tough decisions in regards to making the product implementation in Canada a success. I will indentify some issues that prevented the Canadian product introduction from being successful as well as offer some solutions that would help LB succeed the second time around.

There were three different teams that worked on advertising campaign projects that were to effectively introduce OBC's new product line into the Taiwanese and Canadian markets. The team in the U.K. had created a creative advertising model that had a lot of success in the past. The creative model used on the Taiwanese project was very similar to this model. The team working on the Canadian project decided to go with a different model and approach to introducing the product to the Canadian market. There were a lot of factors that played into the failure of the Canadian project. Initially I saw this movement from a model with proven success to a newly constructed model as an issue. There were communication issues and organizational structure issues that also played heavily into the failure of the campaign. There were two different teams working on the design aspects of the marketing material in which both sides had different visions when it came to the creative process, keeping in mind that all direct marketing designs had to align with that of the interactive and digital marketing platforms. The issues with design philosophy led to a breakdown in communication between the U.K. team and the Canada based team. Sometime after the failure of the Canada project many of the top leaders began to leave the company. Some retired and some took positions with other companies. This had a very big impact on the organizational structure of the teams going forward with the new strategy and attempt to successfully infiltrate the Canadian market with the new product line. This also had an impact on the project to introduce the product in the US market. One of the most important issues in all of this is the relationship strained created between OBC and