Assignment Task

Introduction

We have introduced UWLFlex – our new, online, flexible learning platform. UWLFlex has been designed to complement face-to-face learning and build on our reputation for excellence in teaching, learning and student support. We will be able to deliver a University experience that is more collaborative, active, and relevant for an increasingly digital world thus enabling us to provide you with an improved student experience. UWLFlex will provide you with an enhanced range of online tools, to help facilitate your learning whether this takes place primarily on site or online.

Module summary content and aims

This module is designed to help students gain necessary knowledge and skills that are needed to manage a luxury hospitality brand and its reputation. Students will be able to apply social evaluation theory to a given case study and be able to detect early signals of emerging crisis of a luxury brand. Students will also be able to develop advanced level of understanding of the importance of luxury brand reputation management through appreciation of the anti-laws of marketing a luxury brand and how brand reputation is managed and communicated to different stakeholder groups. This module aims to:

• Provide students with critical insights and comprehensive level of understanding of how opinions and perceptions on luxury hospitality brands are developed and managed.
• Introduce contemporary and radical perspectives on managing the reputation of luxury brands and achieving brand resilience.
• Develop students as more intellectually questioning, enquiring managers and leaders in the luxury hospitality sector

Oral Assignment

Instructions

• Assume you are a marketing brand manager for a luxury hospitality organization (e.g., hotel or restaurant). The CEO of your company has entrusted you to investigate a real life situation in which the reputation of a luxury organization was seriously threatened (the incident must not exceed 5 years). Therefore, you’ll need to first identify a real life negative situation which affected the reputation of a luxury hospitality organization. 
• Demonstrate how the negative situation has resulted in reputational damage to the organization. You will need to rigorously identify and assess the impacts of the crisis on various stakeholder groups (e.g., customers, hotel owners, investors/shareholders, managers/employees, and local communities). 
• Identify the management’s reactive responses to handle the incident and protect the brand`s reputation. (LO4)
• Develop a poster and deliver a 10-minute Poster presentation.

Written Assignment

Situation

After the poster presentation, the CEO is impressed with the case study you have presented. The CEO would like you to investigate the case further and requires you to produce a boardroom report for the company’s Board of Directors. To achieve this, you will need to undertake the following:

1) Briefly introduce the case study- the luxury hospitality organization and the occurrence of reputational crisis.

2) Using the RepTrak model, identify the underperformed reputation drivers that led to the reputational crisis. You should select dimensions that are only relevant to the case study only. Also, briefly discuss the impacts (what impacts and who impacted) of the crisis.

3) Evaluate the effectiveness of management’s reactive responses to this reputational crisis by identifying the strengths and weaknesses of their crisis management and communication during the crisis. Use academic theories and perspectives to justify your discussion.

4) Put forward recommendations to change the taken-for-granted practices or reactive responses (e.g., crisis management and communication) and how to recover from a reputational crisis and rebuild the brand’s reputation. You should apply the various models and frameworks that have been covered in the module.