Wk4 Leadership Blog Post: Leadership Role Model Reflection

Currently 24 years old, you may find it surprising that I've yet to gone a month in my life without eating my favorite food in the world: pizza. I've even yet to gone as even a week without eating the richly satisfying, cheesy, gooey and tarty sauce layered italian sensation assuming the hot equivalent of a bagel with cream cheese and tomato. I once used to say to myself that I'd strive to be the head CEO of every pizza consumer in the universe if one honor were to exist. Personally, however, the single most pizza organization who's leadership I admire and would like to emulate in my leadership style is Papa John's. Back in 2009, Papa John's surpassed $1 million in Mobile Web Orders, and other convenient high-tech resources, making it the world's third largest pizza company and ranked first among pizza companies in the 2008 Brand Keys Customer Loyalty Engagement Index. Similarly enough, Papa John's mission evidently is to create a superior brand loyalty, i.e. "raving fans" through authentic, superior-quality products, legendary customer service, and exceptional community service. It's Universal Value Proposition (UVP) goes hand-in-hand with it's motto: "Better Ingredients. Better Pizza". Papa John's zestfully dominates the pizza industry in its ability to creatively revolutionize technology and connect with its consumers in an innovative way while sustaining the traditional key marketing principle of listening to its audience. 
     
It was Bolivar Jose Bueno, one of the brightest minds in integrated marketing who said in his early twenties that, "companies that listen to the customer--with a creative experience that is driven by the customer--end up creating very powerful brands." Whether or not I was granted a CEO position of pizza consumers, or even labeled the biggest fan in the history of man, every customer equally has a prominent role with company employees in delivering its remarkable success. According to author Tamara L. Gillis in The IABC Handbook of Organizational Communication, "Humans crave security. Next are love and belonging, and followed by esteem needs. The peak of the pyramid is self-actualization, which happens when a person attains a level where he or she seeks to become self-fulfilled. in other words, he or she has a purpose of being." The main innovations that makes Papa John's a household name and gives people a purpose of being is its newly adapted service of ordering food via text-messaging, on top of its text notices of discounts and event highlights, and Papa John's Facebook Fans of the Week section on the company's Facebook page. This integrated marketing communication campaign empowers and utilizes technology and mankind to publicize their famous pizza. 

Text-messaging orders are brilliant, intuitive, and meets our hectic schedules to still enjoy, or in my case engross, in one of America's pasttime, Pizza. As far as Papa John's Facebook Fans of the Week, we see first hand, through digital photographs that fans send in, the beloved admiration and passion consumers have toward the product. Winners are shown in pictures with ecstatic poses with Papa John's pizza delivery guys to their baby reclined with Papa John's paper plates. 

This campaign innovation is not only creative, but brings an advocate of the consumer inside. To stress how productive this strategic leadership style is and note that Papa John's do indeed live up to its superior brand loyalty mission, Papa John's creates a magnificent impression by tapping every succinct brand interaction audio-visually, emotionally, and culturally. We see marketing messages through these winning pictures that features faces that look like ours when we eat Papa John's pizza. We feel strong emotions of pride and happiness, maybe even hunger and jealousy with Papa John's in mind, as we connect with these winning pictures. We even come to terms that we as an American culture cannot live without Papa John's. In the same sense, I want my participants in my Capacity of Music for Change workshop to emphatically connect with music for their vehicle of change to the point where they can't live without spreading their voice to uplift their communities. To impact the audiences of the music we will create, I will stress to my participants to listen to the emotions and strifes of everyone in the room as we collaboratively write and record empowering lyrics for spreading social change awareness. 


Thank you for reading. 


-Shrav