Critical Report Essay

Corporate Communications
Pfizer X Netflix - Giovanna Moraes

This essay is a critical report evaluating two out of eight presentations that aimed to
propose an effective campaign for their respective clients. With this report, I will analyze
their research methods, what they were able to find, and how they used that information to
craft an effective campaign. That being said, in my opinion, the most effective proposal was
by the Netflix group and least effective being the Pfizer group. Although they both planned a
good campaign, the Netflix group was able to stand out.
To begin with, the Pfizer group started by stating what they were going to analyse, which
served as a good guidance for the presentation and cleared their objectives to those watching
it. They did a media scanning, discovery report and suggested recommendations for a
possible campaign. Although they were able to achieve that, the presentation itself lacked
structure and was visually confusing, therefore, even if their information was accurate and
well researched, it was hard to understand what they were talking about, and the information
sometimes wouldn’t match what they were presenting. Their media scanning seemed
complete at first, as they talked about three main concerns that the public had about the
company: lack of organisation, transparency and the issue with trustwhorthiness. However, as
the presentation went on, the scanning was confusing as they did not fully explain what their
findings were, nor what they understood from those. For example, for social media scanning,
they only included screenshots from Twitter, excluding the other social media platforms that
might also have valuable information and with different users. Next, they moved forward to
the 3M framework method analysis, naming the megaphone, monitor, and magnet about their
findings, which was properly reviewed and the most clear part of their report. Furthermore,
they wanted to explain who were their main stakeholders, however, they named nine
stakeholders, doing the exact opposite of naming the most important, which I would say
would be about 5 at most. Finally, they moved to explaining their suggestions for a possible
campaign that would try to change the negative public opinion of the company, which came
mainly after their COVID-19 vaccine. To do that, they chose to have a fun approach on their
other product, viagra, creating shock through humor by eliminating the stigma around erectile
dysfunction. However, the campaign could possibly not be perceived as how they imagined.
According to Forbes, “it’s hard to implement controversial marketing techniques without
being shot down by one group of people or another.” Therefore, Controversial campaigns
have a possibility of backfire because this method could end up offending their audience.
On the other hand, the Netflix group was able to achieve a better result with their
project proposal, with a much more clear explanation of their findings and implementation of
those onto their campaign. On the visual side of their slides, they were very successful in
adding the company’s brand identity, creating an expectation on the audience for their
presentation. They started giving an overview of the company and their history on the
streaming services and a smooth transition to a clear explanation of the issue: password
sharing between users. When describing this problem, they highlighted how it affects their
long-time consumers, who are disappointed in the company and are leading them to
unsubscribe. The group was successfully able to prove through the media scanning, where
they included numerous articles from different sources that demonstrated the users’
dissatisfaction. Moreover, the group explains how the 3M framework can analyse the
situation and give an overall overview of how it applies to the brand. With all that in mind,
the presentation moves forward to their campaign suggestions, where they meticulously
thought about it and suggested that the brand would openly discuss the issue. They
recommended that the company would talk openly about it on different social media
platforms to create a direct connection with their viewers, therefore creating a sense of
community and empathy for their consumers. Communities formed on the web are
particularly robust and enduring due to the diverse and numerous connections that bind the
individuals within them (Fournier & Lee, 2009) , which is particularly good for Netflix due to
their broad demographic.
In conclusion, I believe that the Pfizer group lacked consistency and structure on their
proposal and campaign recommendations, which reflected on their overall performance and
understanding by their viewers. Nevertheless, the Netflix group did an outstanding job when
analyzing the company and their issues, suggesting an effective approach to the issue that
would most likely disassociate them to the problem on stake.

References

Fournier, S., & Lee, L. (2009, April).

Getting Brand Communities Right. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from
https://hbr.org/2009/04/getting-brand-communities-right

Agrawal, A. (2016, January 8). The Pros And Cons Of Controversial Marketing.
Forbes. Retrieved from
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ajagrawal/2016/01/08/the-pros-and-cons-of-controversia
l-marketing/?sh=6523f74c3e51