1. Prepare your Curriculum Vitae and the letter of application which you would send to a company you would like to work for.

2. Try to explain in 150 – 250 words which system is better for the employer and which for the employee: Western – where executives switch jobs several times in their careers or Japanese – where there is a policy of lifetime employment.

UNIT 3

MARKETING SPORTSWEAR

LEAD-IN

Work with a partner to discuss the following questions:

1. Do you think that brand sportswear is really a significant part of the sports industry?

2. What profit do world famous companies get from sponsoring different sport events?

3. What is your opinion towards the phenomenon when sport stars become "faces" of new fashioned brands (They advertise products of a particular company)?

4. How can world famous manufacturers protect their brands from illegal copying?

5. Do you think people, either professional sportsmen or amateurs, pay a lot of attention to brand named sportswear?

Useful language

overall value of a product	абсолютная ценность товара
to grind down	истощать
sell-'em cheap approach	подход "много, но дешево"
high-risk gambit	рискованное дело
distributional policy	распределительная политика
to entice customers	заманивать клиентов
full-scale production	продукция в полном объеме
profitable market	рентабельный рынок
to keep ahead of the competitors	быть на шаг впереди конкурентов
market research department	отдел исследования рынка
technicians and marketing manager	начальник по техническому сбыту и обеспечению
target consumer sponsorship	поручительство, порука, гарантия
buoyant business	оживленный бизнес
marketing outlets	рынки сбыта
direct sales	продажа товара бес посредников
to withdraw one's endorsement	аннулировать индоссамент
accommodation endorsement	"дружеский" индоссамент
not to set at a pin's fee	ни в грош не ставить
dominion	верховенство; господство
dominate	занимать господствующее положение
diversification	стратегия диверсификации
to habituate oneself to smth.	привыкать

Reading

I. Read the following text and be ready to summarise the main idea. Text 1. Giant Leap Forward For The Sportswear Outsider

When Italy played the Czech Republic in the football World Cup one man had a smile on his face whatever the outcome. For Jochen Zeitz, chief executive of Puma, the meeting of the two teams - both with a leaping cat logo on their kit - marks the entry for the German group into football's mainstream.

World Cup affords Puma its greatest ever level of exposure. Amazingly it has trumped its two far larger rivals - Nike and Adidas - and sponsors the highest number of teams in the competition: 12 of the 32 (Nike has eight, Adidas six). Irrespective of results, this means Puma's teams are guaranteed to be in at least half of all games.

All this is extraordinary progress for a company that was all but dead in 1993 when Mr Zeitz took over at the age of 29, making him Germany's youngest chief executive. Its products were found mainly in discount stores and sports retailers found it hard to take the company seriously.

Like the marathon runner he is, Mr Zeitz took the long route, quickly putting the group on an even keel before beginning the slow job of rebuilding the brand and taking the bold step of repositioning it for more fashion-focused consumers.

Puma, with annual sales of about €2bn (£1.4bn), now has the highest profit margins in the industry - at a level more normally identified with luxury goods groups.

"It is night and day," Mr Zeitz says comparing the company as he found it with the company Puma is now. Speaking at its headquarters in Herzogenaurach, the tiny Bavarian town it shares with rival Adidas, he adds: "We are a global company now, no longer German. I mean, can you imagine, when I got here we had what was called an 'export manager' and he couldn't even speak English."

Mr Zeitz lets out a small laugh, something fairly unusual for this serious, often almost dour, manager. He obviously prefers to get on with things rather than sitting around explaining them. For example, Mr Zeitz will go to only a couple of World Cup games as he views all the travelling and waiting as a poor use of his time.

Nevertheless, the story of how he revolutionised Puma and made it one of the world's best known brands sounds remarkably straightforward on retelling.

When he took over, the company was close to going bust and was controlled by its 12 creditor banks. It had not stuck to a budget in eight years and the idea of a profit was an elusive one.

"It was pretty bad. Morale was down a lot. The brand was sleeping," he says.

The first step - before he could tackle the brand issues - was to stop the cash bleed and turn a profit. Mr Zeitz cut costs brutally and moved most of Puma's production swiftly out of Europe to Asia. Within six months - a year ahead of schedule - Puma was in profit.

The restructuring was the initial part of what Mr Zeitz called phase one. Like the Soviet Union, he is a fan of five-year plans. The difference at Puma - currently at the start of phase four, where the aim is to double sales to €3.5bn and possibly make some small acquisitions - is that they have worked.

Four years of record earnings followed the restructuring and by 1998 Mr Zeitz was prepared for phase two - investing in the brand again.

"We invested pretty much all our profitability in marketing. It was during the Asian crisis and others were pulling out but that just meant we could do more," he says.

What came out of intensive discussions on how to position Puma was an entirely new concept in the sporting goods sector - that of sports lifestyle.

Previously brands such as Nike and Adidas had been focused on getting the best athletes to wear their products. Puma's goal was to keep a sporting element but add fashion to the mix.

The first coup was getting Jil Sander to become the first fashion designer to design for a sporting goods company. This was accompanied by Puma's assumption of full control over its US subsidiary.

"Of course when you do something new you take a risk, but it paid off big time, and that is what you do when you try to be an entrepreneur," says Mr Zeitz.

Puma's marketing goal, he explains, was always to make the biggest impact with as small an outlay as possible. It used sponsorships deals with selected athletes - such as the sleeveless football shirts worn by Cameroon or branding the contact lenses worn by runner Linford Christie - to gain huge exposure. Puma got involved in skateboarding contests and disc-jockey events to target a new type of consumer for sporting goods.

The outsider approach continues to this day. For the World Cup, Puma is resisting the high levels of marketing expenditure of its rivals Adidas and Nike, each committed to an estimated €200m for the tournament. Instead its promotional activity includes a tram travelling round Berlin emblazoned with "United for Africa" - a nod to Puma's sponsorship of all five African teams in the ­competition.

There is sound marketing rationale behind all this, Mr Zeitz says. As a relatively small company the best way to grow the brand is to attract the trendsetters first. "You have to convince the innovators, the early adopters. Then the brand gets to a tipping point," he says. Once these are on board you can, in the marketing jargon, sell your products on to the early majority. Mr Zeitz puts himself in this category, saying he often gets overruled on whether a product is cool or not.

At the centre of this approach stands the consumer. This may sound self-evident but too often the real focus of consumer companies are competitors and winning market share.

"We always define our goals not by comparing ourselves against our competitors but by asking what you want to achieve with the consumer. You can't sustain market share if you don't excite the consumer."

To make that work, Mr Zeitz says, first you have to have the brand position absolutely clear. "The brand is like a human being - you can't rationalise it. But what you say is 'What do I want to do with Puma as a personality?', and then with each idea you think, 'Do I like that? Does it make sense?' "

Ideas for new products can come from anywhere. Puma employs brand scouts around the world to check out the latest fashions, marketing people bring another perspective (Cameroon's sleeveless shirts came out of a query by Filip Trulsson, head of football marketing, as to whether football jerseys needed sleeves under the rules). Mr Zeitz says the role of management is to channel creativity.

"There should be at most two steps before a product is judged rather than endless controlling of it. The people who design can very quickly get a decision whether to go ahead with it or not."

Part of Puma's success is also down to its internationalisation. Workers come from all over the world and it has three headquarters - in Herzogenaurach, Boston in the US and Hong Kong. Manufacturing is entirely in Asia - something that Mr Zeitz is unapologetic about. "What is the alternative? The good news is that allegations over cheap labour haven't been made against Puma for years. We have independent NGOs who do the monitoring."

So what is next for Puma? The World Cup offers it a good platform and Mr Zeitz is setting his sights high, given that the Puma brand is now so widely recognised: "The brand has grown up. Now we have to make it an iconic brand, something only a few have achieved."