About Lighting Illusions

Lighting Illusions is an Australian company, which offers technologically advanced and innovative lighting products and ceiling fans. They use a tagline “The name in lights”.  The company is Brisbane based and was founded in 2003. There are two retail stores in Brisbane and other two are in Kawana and Fortitude Valley. The store in Fortitude valley seems to be the ideal LI store which other stores follow. Within a year more three stores will be opened. The company also serves through online. The company sells different types of lighting for indoor to outdoor, LED lighting, Ceiling fans, exhaust fans and globes (Lightingillusions.com.au, 2017). 60 of their sales is covered by fans and lighting and only 5-10 % is covered by specialty items.  The company logo has been redesigned recently.

Lighting Illusions values customers the most. They understand that every customer has different needs. They access every customer’s need and provide them with best range of company products. The online service is also provided for the customers who are too busy to visit the stores. The customers come and visit the stores and try out different alternative options. They can test different wall lights and decide upon the most suitable one. The store visiting customers often test out different fans and check out the products’ service, this helps them to compare among several options and opt for the best one according to their need and desire. However this offer is only limited to their offline customers.

There is an ongoing demand for this service online as well.  The company can actually apply some business strategies and offer the option to their online customers as well.

The company performs on several platforms. Many digital platforms like Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram, advertising through various search engines, televisions, catalogues and magazines. The budget of 19000 is divided across through various platforms. The company sends 21000 emails to individual customers on every Saturday.

The offline customers mostly live around 9 kilometers of the Lighting Illusion stores. Maximum of the customers are the home owners who are redecorating their homes. They are mostly in hurry and do not want to spend much in the lighting. The company mainly aims to the customers of age of 35 to 54. Female customers are given special value.

The market is quite competitive. The market is national based as the voltage difference seems difficult for the company to catch the abroad or world market. Beacon Lighting acts as Lighting illusion’s main competitor in the national market. They apply an effective strategy of using a television platform for their main promotion. The show ‘The Block’ is in partnership with Beacon Lighting and the two leads of the show are the company’s promotional faces. Other competitors are JB Hi-Fi Limited, Harvey Norman Holdings, Myer Holdings Limited, Warehouse Group Limited, Super Retail Group Limited, Osiris Holdings Proprietary Limited, Muir Electrical Company, Cotton on Clothing Proprietary Limited and DSHE Holdings Limited.

Range of Products

Since the inception Lighting Illusion has been applying some limited and specific marketing strategies. The brand awareness must be grown. For that the strategies and operation plans must be coordinated and integrated. The brand must be unique and effective which will help them to race ahead of their competitors.

Beacon Lighting’s website represents the brand image clearly, even though no tagline is shown at the top. The use of yellow in the logo seems appropriate. The website offers a live chat option for the customer assistance (Beaconlighting.com.au, 2017). The use of red, white or black with well designed advertisements look appealing. The catalogue is systematic as all the services are at one place at the bottom of the page.

Criteria	Observations/Examples	Rating
Ability of digital media to transform the organization: Broad vision	The mission of the organization is to provide each customer with quality, practical and effective lighting solutions.  Digital marketing is the most effective strategy of modern business (Ryan, 2016). The marketing offers the company with necessary information, goods, ideas and services. The use of electronic data and platform for concept generation and execution can help the company to achieve the goals. Lighting illusions use few of the available social media platforms. However successful social media marketing is a difficult task and collective responsibility (Tuten & Solomon, 2014). The conversation and communication between the company and the consumer is at root of the social media strategy.  Successful social media marketing brings more revenue by engaging and attracting with potential customers and enhances the brand value. The company’s strategy for store and digital platform are different. The corporate image of the company is not presented and Lighting solutions does not put much effort to represent its corporate image through its digital platform.	5
Integration of marketing, IMC and digital strategy	Few inconsistencies can be experienced in the company’s internet marketing. The communication between the customer and the company through their digital page is not coherent. The customers are not supported through several messages. The company must maintain that the messages they are communicating should not appear contradictory.   The inconsistencies can be experienced in different pages, like in EBay there is different logo for the store, in Home show there is no logo and color inconsistencies, in Yellow Pages just images and only 16 seconds for Television. The company’s digital strategies fail to be effective. Many different messages have been communicated to its customers through various platforms, which are resulting in confusion. Lighting Solutions should be more careful in delivering messages in different platforms. They must utilize the opportunity of sending their messages to many people in the cheapest way.	1
Digital strategy	The company’s digital strategy is not very effective. The digital strategy is expected to expand the company’s benefit. The brand image is not clear, the value is not represented and the customers are not well assisted. There is no balance between the information technology team and leadership of the company.	2
Evidence of search activity	Lighting Illusions does appear on the first page of the most popular search engines of the internet.  Also one can see the paid advertisement at the top of the page.	8
Criteria	Observations /Examples	Rating 1 to 10
Brand messages	The messages on different website appear same. Website like ‘Truelocal.com’ or ‘Brisbanehomeshow.com’ consists of similar messages for the company. However few are not updated as the information related to three new stores are not available in most third party websites.	8
Degree of company involvement in community management	The community management is not just the social media engagement but also the retaining customers, enhancing brand value and increasing drive sales (DeMers, 2017). The community manager does not serve the customers effectively. The lack of online assistance for the customers can be considered to support this. Lighting solutions does not encourage its customers. They do not offer much benefits or rewards like its competitors offer. Lighting solutions should offer discounts and other offers to attract more customers.	2
Social and Digital media tools	Facebook The Facebook page of Lighting Illusions is followed by 2933 people, 64 people have visited and an average of 4.3 starts has been given. The individual post is liked by 2 or 3 people. The last post was 2 days ago, so it is not very active or up to date (Facebook.com, 2017). Twitter Only 24 followers on Twitter. A total number of 35 tweets have been posted by the company. The last tweet was from 2 year back (Twitter, 2017). Instagram Just 12 followers and no posts yet (Instagram.com, 2017). LinkedIn There are 31 followers in LinkedIn (Linkedin.com, 2017). YouTube 175 Subscribers. The last video was uploaded 2 years ago (YouTube, 2017). Blogs The company blog is not updated as the last blog was from 2015 (Lightingillusions.com.au, 2017). Ebay Different logo has been projected. Yellow pages No information is available there only few images of the company. They only focus on Facebook, other valuable platforms like Pinterest is not used by the company.	3
Frequency of use of digital and social media tools	The new messages are not frequent and regular. The company posts messages on Facebook most frequently. However other platforms like Twitter or Instagram are not used much.	2
Criteria	Examples or observations	Rating 1 to 10
Examples of content shared	Product photos Promotional photos Videos- advertisement, activity, home show Sales report Blog articles	5
Strategic user engagement	The digital activity is focused on electronic manufacturing market.  Most of their digital materials are product oriented and advertisements.  It focuses on national market, the whole of Australia. However they do not engage in encouraging its customers by offering attractive gifts or discounts. They are not engaging its customers in such activities which the company can measure in order to improve its business.	7
Measurement of digital performance	There have been fewer attempts to measure the digital activities. In Twitter the regular updates was about the posting of product related photos. However much information has not been collected as there is no implementation of that information on the less active social media platforms.	2

The website of Lighting Illusions does not represent any clear brand image, which can successfully showcase their brand value. The loud and vibrant colors on the advertisements give the feeling that the company is offering cheap products (Lightingillusions.com.au, 2017). On the contrary they have used dark colors in their logo. The dark blue in the background appears confusing. Lighting Illusions is offering lights and fan, so the maximum area covering by a dark color gives a wrong idea. The website does not offer any live chat option to help the customer. They offer a lot of help in their stores, but fail to offer the same through their digital platform. The vision of the company appears at the bottom of the page. No systematic catalogue as everyone has to search for the items separately. Lighting illusions’ digital strategy performance is not impressive. As based upon the research it can be seen that the score is mostly low. Following are some recommendations which the company can adapt in order to improve their business and enhance the brand value.

 The research and evaluation process will help to identify the urgent concerns. They must engage in data mining in order to determine the customer needs. The supply chain management will be enhanced through building supply alliances.

1. The data mining process must be executed by the company in order to understand the employee needs. It can focus on user generated services. The community driven customers must be encouraged and engaged more.
2. To ensure maximum profit on the online business, the company must increase the efficiency of the site. It can bring balance by providing similar offers to both online and offline customers.
3. The online customers should be offered the testing options. They will offer the customers new products of different prices. The company should use few apps to determine their website appeal to its customers. The testing will help the company to understand which products are attracting more people. So they can offer those products in their stores as well. The measurement will help them to design the logo as well.
4. The company has to invest more on the employees who will visit the employees and provide them with several options for the trial. There must a devoted team of talented designers who will identify the flaws in the designs and redesign it to enhance the brand value.  The employees should involve in online activities by posting regularly and measure the response.
5. The company must effectively use Search engine optimization to mak the services more accessible to its customers (Dawson, 2006). This will include the companies’ familiarization with SEO; help them to fix minor issues and using CMS plug-ins and software. This will ensure the company’s visibility to its consumers and to its market competitors.  
6. Above all Lighting Illusions must focus on enhancing customer satisfaction to achieve customer loyalty and desired goals.

References

Beacon Lighting – Lights, Fans and More. (2017). Beaconlighting.com.au. Retrieved 12 August 2017, from https://www.beaconlighting.com.au/

Dawson, A., & Hamilton, V. (2006). Optimising metadata to make high-value content more accessible to Google users. Journal of Documentation, 62(3), 307-327.

DeMers, J. (2017). Why Community Management Is Different From Social Media Marketing. Forbes.Com. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2015/02/12/why-community-management-is-different-from-social-media-marketing/#255566a467d9

Lighting and Ceiling Fans. (2017). Lightingillusions.com.au. Retrieved 12 August 2017, from https://www.lightingillusions.com.au/

Lighting Illusions (@LIGHTINGOZ) | Twitter. (2017). Twitter.com. Retrieved 12 August 2017, from https://twitter.com/lightingoz

Lighting Illusions. (2017). Facebook.com. Retrieved 12 August 2017, from https://www.facebook.com/pg/lightingillusions/photos/?ref=page_internal

Lighting Illusions. (2017). YouTube. Retrieved 12 August 2017, from https://www.youtube.com/user/lightingillusions

Linkedin.com. (2017). Retrieved 12 August 2017, from https://in.linkedin.com/company/lighting-illusions

Ryan, D. (2016). Understanding digital marketing: marketing strategies for engaging the digital generation. Kogan Page Publishers.

Travis Bishop (@lighting.illusions) • Instagram photos and videos. (2017). Instagram.com. Retrieved 12 August 2017, from https://www.instagram.com/lighting.illusions/

Tuten, T. L., & Solomon, M. R. (2014). Social media marketing. Sage.