Case Assignment – Studio 100

Studio 100 Core Competencies

 Employees: Studio 100 pays a lot of attention to attracting the right people. In a fast‐
growing company, the question whether you have the right people is a vivid one. The
company looks for energized and engaged people. There is a deliberate choice not to
attract famous actors for a particular character. The total picture should be right. You
just can’t play Pirate Pete for one year, earn a lot of money, and then leave the
company. Everybody in Studio 100 gets a fixed pay, even the salespeople. This is a
quite conservative rewarding system, yet it focuses on the equal importance of all
factors in the creation and sale of qualitative products.

 Communication: In a fast‐growing company, it is important to keep employees

informed about the strategic projects and key challenges of the organization. Studio
100 organizes ‘strategy meetings’ every 2 to 3 months.

 Creativity & Innovation: Creativity and entrepreneurship are core in Studio 100.
That does not mean that the company thrives on chaos. In the earlier years, the two
managers were entrepreneurial and made decisions without business plans. But
today, the company underpins its new strategic ideas with business plans that are
used flexibly. Creative companies stimulate imagination and out of the box thinking,
which implies a certain chaos in the organization. Studio 100 is no exception. It has
quite a flexible and fluid organization. The company has set up creative cells that
create new characters and monitor the correct interpretation of and alignment with
the character over all different departments, such as the TV department, the
merchandizing department, the theatre department, and the marketing department.
The DNA of Studio 100 can be described as ‘boundless creativity and innovation.’
An essential part of Studio 100’s DNA is about discovery: creating new ideas, every
day, over and over again, starting from a white piece of paper. What makes Studio
100 unique is the fact that the shareholders and founders of the company are still
involved in the conceptual and creative side of the business.

 Management: Stimulating creativity is above all providing the people with a warm
nest, an environment that gives them the possibility to slowly rise and shine. The
management team of Studio 100 sees this as one of their major tasks

 Clear Goals: The company consists of various departments. TV and music are the
primary platforms for launching new characters. Then the company further builds the
content and characters in multimedia such as theme parks, theatre shows, movies,
CDs, books, merchandising, and licensing. All elements are crucial in Studio 100’s
business model. And this requires that teams from different departments work
together seamlessly. The marketing department of Studio 100 plays a very important
 role in this process. In many media companies, the marketing department is a
separate entity, cut off from the creative process. At Studio 100, the two sides have to
work together. Creative ideas are only supported when they can be commercialized.
Studio 100 is business‐driven and no‐nonsense. The company has clear goals. That
makes it different from many other creative companies, who do not make plans and
just carry on, relying on a hazy form of artistry

 Integrated Business Model: Content is created in Studio 100 Benelux. Studio 100
Benelux represents the original, fully integrated business model where characters
show up in live action shows and are then exploited through different channels (stage
shows, DVD, audio, publishing, website, merchandizing and licensing).   Studio 100
Media focuses on selling and distributing Studio 100 programs to TV broadcasters.
No content is created in this unit. The managers of Studio 100 tried to export the
organizational climate of the Belgian unit to the German unit but that did not work
well. In 2012, about 40 people work on the sales and marketing of the international
portfolio and is responsible for 15 percent of the company’s revenues.

 Portfolio Management: Over the years, Studio 100 has developed strong
competences in portfolio management. The different characters have their own
strategy and life cycle. Formats targeted to older children, such as The House of
Anubis or Mega Mindy are more prone to hypes and have the potential to generate
substantial cash flows in short time frames. Formats direct towards younger children,
such as Bumba or Plop have longer life cycles and the potential to generate steady
cash flows over longer periods. The goal of portfolio management is to create the
right mix of formats and characters that generate shorter‐term, potentially more
volatile cash flows, counterbalanced with concepts generating longer‐term steady
cash flows

 Control: In Studio 100, the command‐and‐control style has given way to a ‘softer
control’ with more emphasis on output control. Although the firm uses clear
performance measures to track the progress of specific projects, most attention is paid
to a more personal form of control and coaching. Some projects are monitored
extensively by the top managers, for others there is the confidence that the
organization will bring the projects to a good end. One could say that control is
primarily done through creating an appropriate culture in the organization, a culture
built around creativity, entrepreneurship and informality.