Question

Joanne, a marketing executive of a personal care brand, recently worked on a campaign promoting a new lipstick. Joanne has been good at promoting many skin products and has achieved a successful track record. As it is her first time to supervise a promotional campaign for a cosmetic product, she worked extremely hard to achieve project milestones. However, the campaign failed as it could not achieve the desired objective, which is reaching out to 25,000 people through Internet media to spread awareness. Brenda is Joanne’s manager. In view of the recent failure of a number of promotional campaigns, Brenda decides to meet the supervising staff of each campaign personally, and Joanne is one of them. Joanne is worried about Brenda’s evaluation on her. How would Brenda perceive Joanne’s performance in the promotional campaign? Would Brenda blame Joanne for the campaign failure? Explain by using the factors of the attribution theory supported by case evidence.

Answer 1

As Brenda is about to meet Joanne, to review the campaign's performance, Brenda would rather be interested in knowing the reasons for the failure , rather thanblaming Joanne. Since many campaigns have failed, and Joanne was no exception, she would like to hear it from an employee with successful track record.

The attribution theory comes into play right here, where Joanne is worried. This is a dispostional (internal) type of attribution. Whereas, an unsuccesful campaign is a situational(external) type of attribution. Both these kinds of attributions will have an impact on the behaviour of Joanne, when she meets Brenda.

However, Brenda being a manager, should understand this theory and must have predicted the response she might get from Joanne. Now, Joanne can be defensive and try to reason the failure, or she can be submissive and take all the blame on herself. Brenda has to be cognitive of the fact that this is Joanne's first supervisory role for a campaign and she has proved her worth previously in promoting skin care products. Also, if a number of campaigns have failed, it would not be right to blame Joanne alone. The company might need to look at other factors like, product, positioning, reachability, channels , media, etc. that may have contributed to the failure. Being an experienced professional, Brenda might be knowing the reasons for failure. These external factors will impact her behaviour.