Extra Case Studies and Files Necessary for Marking Assignments

Unit C1 – Assignment 1

Case Study 12: Unmannered manor: Letter requesting reimbursement from Property Vision in London

Source: C. Bovee and J. Thill, Business Communication Today, 5th Edition (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998), 243.

As executive assistant to Barry Lansdon, CEO of Lansdon Holdings, you often handle routine letter-writing tasks. But this situation is stretching your abilities.

Last May Lansdon decided to invest in some property in Great Britain. He'd heard that some of the most historically significant manor houses were on the market, and the notion of joining the landed British gentry--even part time--fired his imagination. He contacted the people at Property Vision of London (with your help), and they replied with a dozen glowing suggestions, including Testcombe Manor in Chilbotin, Hampshire (US$2.8 million), where Edward VII once halted his private train to go fishing. You liked the seventeenth century farmhouse in Kent (US$625,000), but it was Hunsdon House that caught your employer's fancy: The 87-acre estate (US$2.8 million) had supposedly been Henry VIII's hunting lodge.

But when Lansdon and his wife flew over to inspect this genuine Tudor mansion, they suffered quite a shock. Despite the kingly aura of wall-mounted rhinoceros trophies and wallpaper flecked with real gold, only one-quarter of the building could ever have heard Henry VIII's footsteps. It turned out that Hunsdon House had actually been demolished, then rebuilt in the 1700s--nearly two centuries after Henry's death. Moreover, the Lansdons discovered that "medieval" also applied to the plumbing system. They learned that insurers would require them to hire a full-time caretaker (at US$40,000 a year), and the sheer size of the estate demanded a butler (US$55,000), a housekeeper (US$35,000) and a gardener (US$35,000) to keep the spectacular gardens in bloom. And if the Lansdons stayed for more than 90 days a year, they'd have to pay British taxes to boot.

"We never would have made this trip if they'd told us even half of this," Mr. Lansdon sighed as he handed you a folder. "I think we have every right to ask for a reimbursement. You'll find an itemized expense list inside."

Your task: Write the claim letter to Mr. William Gething of Property Vision, 36 Brock Street, London, England W1Y 1AD, UK (Voice: 0171-493-4944, Fax: 0171-491-2548). Unit C1 – Assignment 2

Case Study 7: The shortsighted promotion: Letter from Residence Inn to deal with objections to an ad

As manager of marketing communications for Residence Inn, Joe Okon wanted his advertising to differentiate the chain from competing suite-type hotels. He thought about using a photo of the hotel chain's rooms but rejected that idea as being too similar to everybody else's ads. Instead, he decided to go with something a little bit whimsical--a picture of 12 pairs of men's undershorts: 10 to show the average stay at a Residence inn and 2 to show the average stay at most other hotels.

In many respects, the ad was a big success. During the campaign, calls to the reservation center increased by 150 percent over the preceding year. However, there was one problem: The ad offended many female business travelers. Thirty of them took the time to complain about the "tasteless, sexist" ads. Sarah Carlston, a publicist, was typical of the women who wrote. She said: "You'd think they could have picked better symbols. I wonder what they would have used if they were trying to reach women--bras or panties?"

Your task: Write a letter to Ms. Carlston (Consumer Representative, Boyd Products, Inc., 1650 Delco Dr., Columbus, OH 43216) apologizing for the ad. Offer her a reasonable inducement to give Residence Inn another chance. Case Study 13: No Kool-Aid heads: Memo to Kraft employees about hair-dying fad

They show up glowing blue, green, or red at rock concerts and shopping malls, even college dorms: "Kool-Aid heads," a term coined by The Wall Street Journal for kids who insist that the flavored drink product makes a terrific (and temporary) hair dye.

You're working as assistant to Michael Polk, business director of beverages for Kraft Foods in White Plains, New York. At Kraft, the word about the fad is, "We would never, ever touch it with a t 10-foot pole." So says Polk.

A few decades ago, the company endured some questionable publicity from author Tom Wolfe (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test). Now Kraft management is determined to ignore this latest fad and its unofficial Web site, "Hey Kool-Aid!" (which apparently provides home-grown instructions for dunking your hair into a bowl of warm "Great Bluedini" without staining your forehead). When E. E. Perkins invented Kool-Aid some 70 years ago, this fad wasn't what the Nebraska home-remedy salesman intended.

"All we're about is selling a fun, fruity drink," says Polk. At three packets for $1, Kraft sold $296 million worth of Kool-Aid last year, and the hair-dyers bought only a "tiny" fraction of this amount. Kraft's target consumers are 6- to 12-year-olds, Polk believes, and the way to reach them is through smiling "Pitcher Man" TV ads or through moms who like the nutritious-sounding names like "Island Twists Man-O-Mango Berry." The wildest alternative Kraft will promote is mixing the colored powder into yogurt or cookie dough.

Your task: A few members of Kraft's marketing staff have inquired about targeting the 13- to 25-year-olds who are already mad about Kool-Aid, although not for drinking purposes. Polk wants you to write a memo for his signature, directing all employees to avoid any association with this fad. Case Study 15: IBM blues: E-mail message abou the Olympic fiasco

At the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia, International Business Machines bombed big time with an $80 million information processing system that couldn't deliver scores accurately or on time. IBM spent three years developing the state-of-the-art system, but problems were evident from the first day. News organizations wound up using runners and other low-tech solutions to get the information about athletic comptetions out to the world; meanwhile, fans couldn't access the information promised on IBM's highly touted Olympic Web site, and the faces of Big Blue's top executives were turning red.

As an independent public relations consultant, you've been hired by Jerry Ferguson, CEO of QualSoft, a local software company that's facing a similar situation--albeit on a far smaller scale. Both you and Ferguson are wondering whether anything can be gleaned from IBM's experience. What exactly went wrong with the high-speed information transfer network IBM had set up in Atlanta, and how did IBM respond when the system failed? Did it make the right moves to quell the negative publicity?

Your task: You've done some research and found several articles about IBM's Olympic fiasco, but the most relevant to Ferguson's situation was in The Wall Street Journal on July 25, 1996, "IBM Olympic Embarrassments Drag On as Computers Produce Late, Bad Data." When you begin explaining the article to Ferguson over the phone, he asks you to e-mail a summary of it to [email protected] IBM Olympic Embarrassments Drag On As Computers Produce Late, Bad Data

By Thomas E. Weber and Emory Thomas Jr.

(Reprinted with permission.)

International Business Machines Corp.'s quest for Olympic gold is bringing little but tarnish to its reputation as a technology leader.

With IBM's computers still producing late and erroneous scores five days into the Atlanta games, world- wide attention is focusing on how the glitches could have happened in the first place -- and on the Armonk, N.Y., computer maker's seeming unpreparedness to solve them swiftly.

Big Blue's public black eye underscores the inherent risks of a company putting its core products and services to a severe test like the Olympics in front of a global audience, including thousands of corporate customers enjoying the games as IBM guests.

"It's an embarrassment," said Joe Clabby, director of research at Aberdeen Group, a Boston-based technology consultancy that monitors IBM products. "It's crucial for them to prove they can respond to something like this."

But IBM has failed. Its problems in Atlanta have been both major --computer networks failed and news organizations waited up to 90 minutes to get scoring results from numerous events -- and minor -- even an IBM computer kiosk in the International Olympic Committee's hospitality suite near the Games wasn't working yesterday.

A beleaguered IBM yesterday struggled to recover from its foul-up and explain how it occurred. The computer giant had set up a woefully slow transmission system to send scores from its data center to news organizations. Company executives said it has since fixed this problem, upgrading its transmission speed and rigging its computers to feed all the news organizations at once, instead of one at a time as it had been doing.

Earlier in the week, IBM assigned 50 additional technicians to work on other glitches, such as the problem of inaccurate results and information about athletes. The problem was software: Information was being entered into IBM's master database properly, but when its computers tried to retrieve a specific piece of data -- an athlete's height, for example -- the machines would fetch information from the wrong spot, calling up, say, an athlete's age.

While IBM stressed that its computer woes haven't hampered actual competition at the games, its senior project executive for the Olympic Games, Bruce Sanders, conceded: "I wish in retrospect we had spent as much time dealing with the press system as we did on systems for the athletes and the field of play." It may be too late to soothe the media. Angry news organizations are still complaining about the foul-up. "Without these results, we can't do our work," says Jarle Hoeysaeter, a spokesman for the European Broadcast Union, a group of 88 television networks airing the games. Some of the organizations rattled sabers about seeking possible financial redress from the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games.

IBM's plans for the Olympics were grandiose from the start. Among other goodies, it promised an elaborate combination of mainframes, minicomputers, personal computers and transmission lines -- all coordinated from a control center it won't disclose for security reasons. The "Info '96" system was supposed to zip scoring, timing, statistics and distance information from 29 athletic arenas --generating an estimated 30 million reports over the 17 days of the Games-- to numerous constituencies, from its client Olympic organizers to harried reporters. IBM was also responsible for a Games management system that coordinates numerous Olympic activities, including staffing, accommodations, logistics, medical services, ticketing, transportation and uniforms.

"Our biggest challenge will be staying current with the demands and needs of broadcasters and other users," an IBM executive said during a presentation of the company's Olympic technology in February. And when would all this be up and running? "July 19," he said, "is the first time we get to test the Olympic system."

Clearly, IBM's testing wasn't enough. While repairs have improved its Olympic computing, the disarray following the first signs of trouble may prove to be IBM's unfortunate public-relations legacy.

"America is expected to get things like logistics and technology right," said a member of the International Olympic Committee. "That's supposed to be a given. And that's why this is such a surprise."

Case Study 16: Trendsetters: Memo summarizing a new marketing tactic

You're working for Abbie Rose, a small clothing design company in Los Angeles--a compnay that was started by baby boomers in the 1980s and that has always taken pride in anticipating trends, or even starting them. But yesterday your boss, Rose Jennings, came to you with an unusual request.

"At the Kiwanis meeting last night, someone told me that Reebok, Pepsi, and other big companies have been using a kind of 'guerrilla research' to anticipate fashion trends among young people," she said. "The man said he'd read something in the New York Times, or somewhere, about companies sending people out to rock concerts and clubs in the city, looking for the hippest kids, the trendsetters. You know--the coolest street kids start wearing dark nail polish and six months later suburban kids are asking for it at the mall. We've always tried to know what kids want before they do--especially since it takes so long to get new styles into production and out into the marketplace. See what you can find out about this guerrilla technique. Find that article and brief me on the high points."

Your task: You looked in The New York Times index for the last three weeks but found nothing; then you tried an online periodicals index and found an article in The Wall Street Journal titled "Marketers Seek Out Cool Kids for Tomorrow's Mall Trends" (July 11, 1996). That must be it. As Jennings asked, read the article and write her a memo summarizing the facts in one or two paragraphs Marketers Seek Out Today's Coolest Kids

To Plug Into Tomorrow's Mall Trends

By Roger Ricklefs

07/11/1996

Rachel Ayala, a 23-year-old aspiring painter in New York, is the very essence of cutting edge. She frequents the downtown-Manhattan club scene and works at a trendy pan-Asian restaurant. Her tastes run to trip-hop music ("an underground British thing that is now surfacing in the U.S.") and vinyl pants in metallic colors. "I'm opposed to just blending in," she says.

These days, middle-aged marketing executives are hanging on the every utterance of young trendsetters like Ms. Ayala. The reason is simple: Kids are fickle, but products have long lead times. Companies need to glean what young people will want months down the road, when the merchandise actually reaches stores. All eyes, then, are on young people who can smell a trend -- or start one -- before the mainstream has a clue. And a mini-industry that tracks them for big corporations is thriving as never before.

Once, designers dictated fads and fashions; today's trends more typically bubble up from the streets. Cool city kids adopt baggy jeans or body-piercing, say, and before long the craze shows up in suburban high schools. The result? "Now we're watching kids , whereas we used to watch designers," says Ruth A. Davis, a product director at Reebok International Ltd., the Stoughton, Mass., maker of athletic shoes and other garments. At the same time, she notes, "trends among cutting-edge kids simply change much more rapidly than in the past." The vastly increased attention that the media give to hip-hop styles and the like increases their influence all the more.

Hoping to keep ahead of the marketplace, Ms. Davis last year turned to Sputnik Inc., a New York market- research company that specializes in the youthful cutting edge (including Ms. Ayala). With other clients such as Burlington Industries Inc. and PepsiCo Inc., Sputnik says its revenue this year is running 40% ahead of last year.

Such firms cast a wide net in search of the ultranew and ultracool. Cheskin + Masten/ImageNet, a market-research and consulting company based in Redwood Shores, Calif., recently sent three researchers with cameras to a rock and folk-music concert dedicated to freeing Tibet.

As Tibetan monks chanted and musicians played in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, the researchers checked out offbeat colors and changing tattoo patterns. Green hair and pierced lower lips were plentiful, as was service-station-attendant garb ("mechanic-wear").

By themselves, such findings can't rescue a lame ad campaign or product. Nor does every idea hatched at an East Village rock concert catch fire with the mall crowd. Nonetheless, the research companies find demand is strong for their market intelligence.

The Zandl Group in New York is getting more research assignments to follow leading-edge young people, says Irma Zandl, president. Clients "used to see them as fringe, but they don't see them as incidental any more," she adds. Last October, Lambesis Inc., a San Diego advertising agency, started a youth-marketing department that devotes about half of its research to trendsetters. Another firm, Teenage Research Unlimited in Northbrook, Ill., says its business has more than doubled in the last five years. "More and more clients want to be able to target the [cutting-edge] group," reports Peter Zollo, president.

Companies are putting the research to use. Sputnik, for example, helped Reebok decide to introduce new sneakers in soft, pastel colors. Burlington Industries in Greensboro, N.C., learned from Sputnik a year or so ago that trend-setting urban kids were wearing stiff, unwashed jeans because they liked the darker color. Burlington soon began producing denim with deeper dyes. "Now it is a big thing with suburban mall kids ," says Kathleen Barton, vice president of product marketing at the company's Burlington Denim unit.

David Burwick, director of PepsiCo's Mountain Dew brand, uses the research in developing promotions. Finding a while ago that pagers were still considered cool , Mountain Dew developed a promotion that offers customers a low-priced pager if they consume enough of the soft drink. (The stunt has drawn fire from some children's advocates, who object to advertising pitches on the pagers themselves. But PepsiCo says it's targeting teens and young adults, not children.)

The actual market research often begins in underground dance clubs, extreme sports competitions and other magnets for the young. Sputnik employees find subjects they deem especially hip and pay them several hundred dollars to interview dozens of their peers on videotape.

Club denizens are thought to be especially influential bellwethers. "If you can understand club kids , you can understand what is going to happen," says Joanne De Luca, a Sputnik principal. A few years ago, she notes, club kids started wearing extremely dark nail polish. "Now my 11-year-old niece in Pleasantville [in suburban New York] has dark nails," she says.

Researchers concede the risks inherent in basing a mass-marketing strategy on the whims of a small sample of urban style-setters. Alternative kids may "experiment with 10 trends, and only one will cross over" to a mainstream market, says Christopher Ireland, a principal in Cheskin + Maasten/ImageNet.

Reebok's Ms. Davis adds that cutting-edge trends "are useful to follow, but I wouldn't rely totally on them, because other things influence kids ."

Besides, cool kids disagree about what is cool . In one Sputnik video, a youth admires the genuine-suede uppers on a pair of sneakers. But another, declaring that what people do to animals is a "holocaust," says she refuses to wear leather.

None of this dampens marketers' fascination with the sort of kids some may hope their own children don't become. Says Ms. Zandl, the New York market researcher: "They pinpoint the future for you."

Cutting Edge

Some trends among club kids and other cool young Americans

Fall 1996

 Girls in dominatrix clothing  Bright skeleton prints  Comic graphic T-shirts  Reflective trim on field-sports shoes  Hair sectioned into little wrapped ponytails that look like rockets projecting from the head Spring 1997

 Guys in vinyl shirts  See-through track shoes  Suspenders with African-print shirts  Military shoes, traditional Oxfords, mixed with Muslim Malcolm X look  Skinny ties, white shirts, basic black pants and jackets

Source: Sputnik Inc. Unit C3

Case Study 9: The glass bicycle: Persuasive letter from Owens-Corning requesting bids for manufacturing rights

A student design group from Brazil’s University of Sao Paulo has come up with the winning bicycle design in the Global Design Challenge. Sponsored by Owens-Corning, the competition called on teams from eight top design and engineering schools in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, and South America to design a bicycle that would cost less than $100 and would incorporate mainly glass-fiber composites in the construction. The winning entry, called the Kangaroo, uses glass fiber reinforced polyester for its framework and has an estimated manufacturing cost of $82. Moreover, some unique features make it a product of truly world wide potential. An adjustable wheelbase can be shortened to allow easier maneuvering in city traffic, and the seat and handlebars can be adjusted within a range to suit 95 percent of the world’s population. Since more than half of the people on the globe depend on bicycles as their primary means of transportation, and since bicycles require no fossil fuel for operation, this product has tremendous potential in countries from Abu Dhabi to Zimbabwe.

As Owens-Corning’s North American licensing manager, your job is to sign up companies to produce and market the Kangaroo bicycle for the U.S., Mexican, and Canadian markets. A manufacturing deal has been arranged with a Chinese producer who can deliver the bicycles to any West Coast NAFTA port for $86, including shipping, taxes, and tariffs. Your problem is that you have no distribution system to handle bicycles, so you must find a marketing partner who will license the rights to distribute and market the Kangaroo in North America. Your preference is to find a single marketer to serve the entire region, and priority will be given to companies such as Schwinn, Nishiki, and Cannondale Bicycles who are currently using Owens-Corning materials in their products. You are planning to license the marketing rights for a five-year term for an initial payment of $350,000 plus 8% of gross sales.

Your task: Write a persuasive letter to Mr. Gregg Bagni, Marketing Director, Schwinn Bicycle & Fitness (1690 38th Street, Boulder, CO 80301-2602), requesting a bid on the North American marketing rights and offering him first refusal. Point out the features you feel will make the Kangaroo a widespread success, and be sure to spell out the financial terms. He can then determine whether the deal makes sense from his perspective. But don’t give him too much time—ask for a response within ten days. Unit D1

TEXT from the TOP

Children having children is a problem as old as parenthood itself. According to statistics Canada nearly 25,000 children are born to Canadian teens every year. While there is no shortage of debate about the causes and solutions to teen pregnancy and parenthood, only one program leaves the decision-making to the most influential people involved: teens themselves.

Baby Think It Over is a lifelike doll whose crying is electronically programmed to mimic the needs of a newborn infant. Baby Think It Over is a round-the-clock responsibility for the teens and pre-teens who become its “parents”. Through its related curricula, they also explore the emotion, financial and interpersonal changes that a baby would bring to their lives.

Like a real infant, Baby Think It Over runs on one schedule: its own. Student “parents” quiet Baby’s crying with a plastic probe worn on their wrist. Tending can take up to 35 minutes: as long as it normally takes to feed, bathe, change or soothe a real baby. Shirking their parenting duties is virtually impossible for students, because Baby’s electronics will record and report neglect or physical abuse. The tending probe is attached to the teen’s wrist with a non-transferable band to insure that the responsibility stays with the “parent”.

While most teens can easily imagine feeding, dressing and cuddling a baby, many do not reckon on the lifestyle changes and sacrifices that a baby would required. The Baby Think It Over Program brings home many of these realities. Sleeplessness, inconvenience, limited social life and disapproving stares in public are the most common complaints of students who have spent more than 24 hours with Baby Think It Over. Optional assignments within the program focus on the cost of raising a baby, and it’s impact on a relationship and family life.

Baby Think It Over is 50 cm long, weighs about 4 kg and is available in either gender for the Caucasian, African-Canadian, Asian, and Hispanic ethnicities. Program instructors can control Baby’s settings to reflect an “easy”, “normal” or “cranky” temperament. Also available is a drug-dependent version, whose smaller size, distressed cry and tremors simulate the effects of infant drug withdrawal.

TEXT from the BOTTOM

Before this project the thought of being a parent always excited me. I thought it would be so much fun taking care of a young, little, cute baby.

I always knew that babies cried but I guess I didn’t realize just how often.

This baby was a big responsibility because I had to make sure that everywhere I went someone had to be watching the baby and making sure that if it was to cry someone would be ready to tend it.

I never even though of some of the little sacrifices that had to be made. I had to ask people to watch the baby when I was in the shower, went to the washroom, took the dogs for a walk or when I was trying to do work.

This baby was also inconvenient to carry because it wasn’t very light so after a while it started to hurt my arm.

I think that this project was an excellent idea for the family studies department. I feel that this is an experiment that everyone in school should have to do. It gives you a chance to understand what it is like to be a parent without getting pregnant. I also think that the more girls who do this experiment, the less teenage pregnancies there would be.

This Doll gave me a chance to take on a few responsibilities of being a mother without really having a child. CHRISTINE HEINOLA GRADE 11 STUDENT YORK MILL, C.I. Unit D2

Unit D3