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3. Read the article again. Tick the factors below which have contributed to Miele’s success.

It has excellent quality control in its factories.

It changes its position in the market according to demand and fashions. Its prices are very competitive.

It uses a lot of outside suppliers.

It spends more money than other manufacturers on creating new products. It does a lot of testing.

It focuses on every detail of production. Each component lasts a long time.

4. Match words or phrases from the article to these definitions.

1 the most important company of its type in the world (noun, paragraph 1) 2 measures of quality by which the processes of producing goods in factories

are judged (noun, paragraph 1)

3 to sell products more cheaply (verb, paragraph 1)

4 providing all the things that are needed without help from outside (adjective, paragraph 2)

5 employing another company to do work for you (verb, paragraph 2) 6 a high price for something special (noun, paragraph 4)

5. Discuss these questions.

1 Can companies outsource and still maintain quality?

2 Can companies do everything in-house and remain competitive?

3 What methods or systems can companies use to maintain quality in: a) food production? b) hotels? c) airlines? d) banking?

ROLE-PLAY

Quality is seen as being a very important factor in any business. It does not have to be a physical product for which quality is important: service industries are just as much concerned with quality, as are manufacturers.

This Activity is based around a role-play exercise focusing on a car dealership. The firm and the personnel involved are all fictitious but the issues highlighted in the letter are real.

The Scenario

This is a role-play exercise in which you are the management team at a dealership of a prestigious car brand in the UK. You have received a letter from a customer highlighting a number of issues relating to one of the premium vehicles in the company's range.

The letter is one example of a number of worrying comments received from not only customers but also the motor vehicle press about the quality of the PMV

range. The dealership, however, faces a difficult series of decisions. It has failed to meet its sales targets for two years and is under pressure from the PMV head office to get results. If it does not meet its targets for next year, it risks losing the dealership.

The senior management team have arranged a meeting at which they are seeking to discuss the problems facing the company. Read the short profile of each member.

Your Task

You must spend a short time preparing for the meeting at which the key problems will be discussed. The intention of the meeting is to formulate a plan to deal with the problems. The plan will be drafted out and discussed amongst the rest of the class.

The Outcome

The aim of the Activity is to recognise the issues surrounding a firm purporting to have quality at the heart of its activities. You will need to consider the views of all the members of the management team and to make a contribution to the formulation of a plan to begin to solve some of the problems highlighted. You will need to be mindful of the relationship between the dealership and the senior management of the manufacturers. Part of your task will be to decide on how significant the potential problems are that face the business.

Once you have completed your plan, you should compare and contrast your proposals with those of other groups in the class. The focus of the discussion should be on the most appropriate strategy to raise the quality assurance policies of the company.

The Personnel:

James Blackwell - Managing Director of the dealership and Chair of the meeting. Mr Blackwell has been the MD for 8 years during which time the dealership has seen good and bad times. He has always professed to be totally committed to quality but is not always around to ensure that the business meets his standards. His excuse is that he pays others to ensure that what he wants is carried out!

Mike Royston - Service Manager. He has tried hard to improve quality standards since his promotion to the post from another dealership in 2002. He sees problems in communication as being the key issue in customer relations.

Michelle DuPre - Accounts Manager. An experienced management accountant with her fingers on the pulse of the business. She has recognised the impact on the costs of the business of the warranty work that is being done on vehicles and the fact that warranty work not only does not generate revenue but also prevents revenuegenerating work from taking place.

Yvonne Wilson - Sales Director. Yvonne is getting concerned at the feedback from customers and the press at the image the company seems to be getting. She faces searching questions from prospective customers and is finding it increasingly difficult to persuade such sceptical customers of the commitment to quality that the

firm has. In addition, she recognises that the firm's customers tend to be from the A and B list and as such tend to be informed and aware of the issues facing the firm. Douglas McAndrew - Promotions Manager. He sees the issues as being a small minority of people who have had unfortunate problems with their vehicles. His work in promotions involved him with the management at the Head Office of PMV cars and he is convinced of the quality of the product. He feels that the customers who have legitimate complaints have been 'unlucky' but are not representative of the client base as a whole.

Letter of complaint

Mr J. Blackwell Managing Director PMV Cars

Premier Motor Vehicles UK plc Exeter

EX15 9BC

Re: PV450 series

Registration Number: HY03 TMK

Dear Mr. Blackwell,

Some time ago you issued an urgent recall notice regarding the seat belt buckles of the PV450 series. As I am no longer the owner of the car, I was tempted to ignore the notice, save myself some time and wish the poor sod who bought the vehicle ‘good luck’.

However, I feel that you and senior management at the manufacturing centre should be made aware why I disposed of the expensive motorcar. It most certainly was not because of some suspect seat buckles.

In my opinion the PV450 range should have been recalled the moment they fell off the production line. Here follows an account of my 12 months PMV vehicles experience during which I covered a mere 2,100 miles.

The fitted alarm, a disaster supreme: sirens and lights went off frequently when operating the remote control. I was told by your local experts that the security code was extremely long and sophisticated and it required pressing the button for at least one second. Horse-feathers: my present vehicle’s code is just as long, it can even dead-lock the doors and has not once produced a false alarm. The alarm also went off for no reason at all whilst driving down the High Street - a rather embarrassing experience in a vehicle of such calibre. On another occasion, the interior lights illuminated during travel and without an obvious reason, though when reaching home and opening the driver’s door, all hell broke loose. I was unable to shut the alarm off, much to the amusement of the neighbourhood. Your local dealer, was called out on countless occasions and there will be a record of the vehicle’s history on file.

Right from the first day the rear seat unit produced an irritating rattle. You tried over several days to find a remedy, but without much success, yet they still returned the vehicle to me. Since my local chemist did not run a special

promotion on ear-plugs, I returned the car to you and was told that a new rear seat assembly would be required. Whether this was fitted or not, a week later the irritating noise was less obvious but still noticeable to an extent that would have made a Lada salesman blush.

I made as little use of the vehicle as possible - the alarm was a bit of a deterrent - but I was slightly stumped when one day the battery failed to start the car. You did your bit again, I was given further expert opinion that the sophisticated electronics needed regular driving and 10 days rest was bad for the battery. I pointed out that I was not prepared to lug around a 10 kg battery every time I left the car at an airport for the duration of a short business trip. My fears of having to charge up the battery in foreign hotel rooms were unfounded, the battery was found to have two faulty cells. A replacement rectified the not too small inconvenience.

Occasionally it rains in the United Kingdom. Imagine my surprise when one day I opened the passenger door and found Ѕ centimetre of water on the floor sill. The same water level could be found in the off-side rear compartment and further back into the load area. This amazing discovery was followed by another invigorating week for the vehicle at your service area. Just as well I have two reliable cars by different manufacturers at my disposal.

By this time, and I trust you will not be offended by the thought, I had decided to sell the car. Three expensive adverts in the Sunday Times resulted in only one luke-warm enquiry and no sale, though, out of the blue a local person showed some interest in the pile of junk. Desperate to make a sale, I washed the car and even brushed out the immaculate interior. That was when I found a piece of plastic on the driver's floor. I picked it up and viewed it in amazement: it was the most crudely crafted piece of plastic I have ever come across - an accelerator pedal. Even found the plastic (yes, plastic!!) coupling to fix the pedal to the metal - now here is a reason for recall if you ever needed one! How about a bit of offroading in Sloane Square (London, U.K.) with the pedal falling off?

By the way, the local interest in the vehicle ended in no sale.

The American style handbrake or ‘parking brake’ indicates clearly that nobody had ever envisaged the PV450 to be used off-road with perhaps the exception of a Tesco’s mother-and-child-only parking bay. I certainly would be unhappy to have to make use of such a contraption on the snow-covered roads of the Italian Dolomites.

The leather seats were designed for Sudanese brass monkeys or Americans. They gave no hold and were by far the most uncomfortable seats I have experienced outside the cathedral of the Holy Virgin in Galway (Republic of Ireland).

There is also the extreme use of cheap plastic in a vehicle of such a renowned past: the little handle which opens the bonnet will most likely not last for the third oil-change, the pitiful rear ashtrays (though I do not smoke) would never meet the stringent quality requirements of a give-away in a cornflakes box, the cupholders were surely designed by a brainless imbecile.

In a last attempt to impress my clients with my car and in order to curtail

my losses to a minimum, I contacted your sales director, Mrs Yvonne Wilson and checked out the latest PV450 series which by now had been improved and built by Austrians. Mrs. Wilson was fully aware of the history of my vehicle and expressed her sympathy with words to the effect ‘the quality one expects of owning a PMV’ and that she would contact me. That was during December 2003. Last words of wisdom!

My patience came to an end and I have since bought another vehicle from a different manufacturer, the eighth in my ownership and a vehicle, which gives me the confidence to attempt to leave the periphery of Exeter. Though I miss the Bose hi-fi unit of the PV450...

I thought you might be interested in my humble opinion of the pile of junk which has lost me more than Ј 10,000 in such a short time of ownership and just over 2,100 miles. It is my hope that somebody at Mercedes PMV will remember how the word ‘quality’ was spelled just a few years ago. It might also be prudent to clarify the expression ‘ff-road’ to your customers as in the case of the PV450 it is more likely to entail the hospitality and bad coffee at one of your many dealerships.

Yours sincerely, Edmund Nдgele, FRPS

Edmund Nдgele is a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain (Amended letter reproduced by kind permission of Edmund Nдgele,

http://www.nagele.co.uk/ml320)

Branding

1.Discuss the following questions.

1.What is ‘brand’?

2.Do you have any branded products? Do these products have anything in common?

3.How loyal are you to the brands you have chosen?

4.If you don’t buy branded goods, explain why.

5.Summerise the main features of brands?

VOCABULARY THROUGH THE CONTEXT

Word combinations with ‘product’

Goods

Goods can refer to the materials and components used to make products, or the products that are made.

Here are some examples of these different types of goods.

Consumer goods that last a long time, such as cars and wishing machines, are consumer durables. Consumer goods such as food products that sell quickly are fast-moving consumer goods, or FNCG.

Brands and branding

A brand is a company gives to its products so they can be recognized. This may be the name of the company itself: the make of the product. For products like cars, you refer to the make and model, the particular type of car, for example, the Ford (make) Ka (model).

Brand awareness or brand recognition is how much people recognize a brand. The ideas people have about a brand it its brand image. Many companies have a brand manager.

Branding is creating brands and keeping them in costumer’s minds through advertising, packaging, etc. A brand should have a clear brand identity so that people think of it in a particular way in relation to other brands.

A product with the retailer’s own name on it is an own-brand product (BrE) or own-label product (AmE).

Products that are not branded, those do not have a brand name, are generic products or generics.

1. Match the sentence beginnings (1-7) with the correct endings (a-g). The sentences all contain expressions from A opposite.

1 Banks are adding new types of accounts

1 A brand associated with expensive, high quality products

2 The person responsible for planning and managing a branded product 3 The brand with the largest market share

4 A famous brand with a long history

5 The ideas and beliefs which consumers have about a brand

6 The tendency of a customer to continue buying a particular product 7 Using a successful brand name to launch a product in a new category 8 The knowledge which consumers have of a brand

b) Complete the sentences with word partnerships from ex. a).

1 Lives, which has been established for over a 100 years and is world-famous, is a

……… .

2 The aim of the advertising campaign is to increase ……… so that consumers become more familiar with our coffee product.

3 Volvo’s ……… is that of a well-engineered, upmarket, safe car. 4 Suchard is a ……… of Swiss chocolate.

c) Make four sentences of your own using the remaining word partnerships.

4. a) Choose two letters from the alphabet. Write one letter in each of the boxes below. You have five minutes to think of as many famous brands beginning with those letters.

b)Choose a brand from the list. Answer the following questions:

•What is the brand name?

•Is it a power brand?

•What do you think is the brand essence?

•What is your image of the brand?

•Can you describe the brand parity and its positioning?

•Can you say how the brand creates and maintains loyalty?

READING

1. Match each company to the corresponding business sector.

2. Guess the names of the following companies, using the list in ex. 1. Check your answers in the article.

(a)the world’s top brand: …….. (d) highest Japanese company: …………

(b)highest non-US company: …… (e) highest UK company: ………………

(c)highest German company: ……

Listing by: Interbrand / July 2005

World’s Top 100 brands

Some companies’ logos and images are internationally famous. The latest ranking, by Interbrand, lists the 100 most valuable global brands. None is stronger than Coca Cola, named the world’s top brand for the fourth year in a row, beating Microsoft into second place. Over half the Top 100 are US firms – Finland’s Nokia at number 6 is the highest position by a non-US company.

Clear trends include Asia’s power as a car manufacturer, with Toyota entering the Top 10 at number 9, the highest Japanese company in the list, while Mercedes is the highest position from a German company. New entries include UPS, Google, Novartis and Zara, the Spanish fashion chain. The highest UK position is the HSBC at number 79.

There is no Visa or Wal-Mart in the list – the criteria for qualifying are tough. Brands must be worth at least $2.1 billion dollars, and most importantly, one third of the company’s income must come from outside its own domestic market. The fastest rising company on the list is South Korea’s Samsung in 19th position, which has recently focused on quality, design and innovation.

Traditional advertising is changing. In the past, global fame was largely due to billboards and the 30 second commercial. Product endorsement is still a powerful tool – with actress Uma Thurman promoting Luis Vuitton. Increasingly, advertising is integrated into entertainment, such as BMW’s series of short Internet videos. The Internet is playing a key role in helping companies like Google and Amazon reach a global market, without relying on traditional advertising methods. With international competition as fierce as ever, companies will have to keep coming up with ways to keep their brand a focus of consumer attention.