5. Explain the following English words and word combinations in your own words.

To get hammered, to focus on compliance as a red herring, to undermine, facet, savvy, to vindicate, blow-up, to rig, to downgrade, to oust, fore, allegations, adverse publicity.

6. Decide which of the following statements are right and which are wrong. Give the correct variants.

1. The company’s reputation can be eroded by adverse publicity.

2. The staff, shareholders and customers are becoming much more sensitive to reputation.

3. Within days of the charges, shares in Marsh & McLennan had increased nearly half their value.

4. The net result of the corporate scandals is the reduction of companies’ staff.

5. Everybody thinks that the most reliable method of dealing with risk is still to concentrate on fostering a strong corporate culture based around reputation.

6. Eliot Spitzer, New York’s attorney-general, contended earlier this month that insurers were rigging business, stifling competition and cheating customers.

7. A company’s reputation might be eroded by adverse publicity.

8. Companies have often interpreted rules in a way to avoid reputational risk.

7. Make up your own sentences using the words and word combinations given below.

To rig business, to stifle competition, to bring a lawsuit against, to downgrade a debt, to come on the heels of trouble, to be eroded by adverse publicity, to push stocks, to undermine reputation, to settle a lawsuit, to oust senior executives, to guard against less quantifiable threats, to vindicate efforts, to become savvy about, to foster a strong corporate culture.

8. Discuss in groups the following questions.

1. What are the four options for dealing with risk? Can you give examples of each?

2. What are the six criteria for making a risk insurable?

3. What is the difference between coinsurance and deductible insurance?

9. Find any insurance policy. Bring some policies to class and discuss them. Do you understand what is covered and what is not? Should policies be clearer? Why aren’t they?

10. A) Find some information about such careers as actuary and claims adjuster for an insurance company. Report your findings to class and discuss these careers.

b) In pairs make up dialogues between a journalist and actuary or claims adjuster.

Economic issue: advertising

FINANCIAL TIMES NOVEMBER 4 2004

A hard line on flights of fancy

The marketing guru believes advertising agencies have lost their magic and tells Gary Silverman why corporate innovation can be a cry for help

Sergio Zyman doesn’t want to teach the world to sing. He wants to teach it to sell, and he is taking no prisoners as he forges ahead with his campaign. The former chief marketing officer at Coca-Cola is the self-styled hard man of his profession.

Mr Zyman’s unsentimental nature becomes clear as he discusses one of the best known television commercials made by his former employer, the 1970s hilltop advertisement that featured the song I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.

Sitting in the lobby of his London hotel, dressed rakishly in a dress shirt unbuttoned at the neck, Mr Zyman allows that the ad “was a moment of joy for employees of the company”. But he maintains that it never sold more Coke.

“It didn’t do anything for consumers,” he says.

Mr Zyman’s slash and burn commentary is well-timed. This is an era of high anxiety in advertising. Dwindling audiences for network television have left corporations looking for new ways to reach consumers. Since leaving Coke in 1998, Mr Zyman has responded with several books offering suggestions: The End of Marketing As We Know It; The End of Advertising As We Know It and this year’s Ren­ovate before you innovate -why doing the new thing might not be the right thing.

Mr Zyman is a rarity among business gurus in the sense that his record has been marked by success and failure. He was part of the management group responsible for the New Coke disaster. He also was running marketing when the company’s fortunes rebounded in the 1990s.

His current mantra is that innovation strategies can represent a cry for help. Companies expand into new areas or launch brands because “people get bored doing the same thing”. Executives, particularly in marketing, believe they will be better rewarded for flights of fancy than for small improvements.

The problem with innovation, he says, is that it can be deceptively expensive. Development costs often end up as fixed costs, he says. Then there are the opportunity costs that arise from focusing on the wrong issues. Executives would be better off finding better ways to deliver existing products and services, he argues.

“If you are looking for a way to go to Wall Street and show you are going to grow 10 per cent in volume, you introduce an inefficient product,” he says. “And then you cut your overall margin.”

Mr Zyman is particularly caustic in discussing advertising agencies, a group that he grew to know well during his days at Coca-Cola. His take on the industry recalls the view of Hollywood expressed by Norma Desmond, heroine of the film Sunset Boulevard. Agencies are not what they used to be, he says.

“Advertising agencies were almost like a refuge. They were places for ideas. Those guys were magicians – Merlins – they created things,” he says. “When David Ogilvy walked into a client meeting, people would say: ‘Whoa! David Ogilivy!’.”

Now, he says, agencies are run by anonymous figures. “Who are the great advertising gurus of this age? I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t think anyone really calls the head of the agency today. I don’t think anyone even knows who the head of the agency is.”

As he is in other industries, Mr Zyman is suspi­cious of consolidation in advertising. He believes few, if any, big clients want a one-stop shop for all marketing services. “I just don’t think it works,” he says. “The reason I went to 32 advertising agencies is not because I said, ‘Oh my God, I want to go to 32 advertising agencies.’”

Mr Zyman also offers an intriguing insight into the reaction of corporate clients to advertising mergers. He says the fact that clients keep silent does not mean they approve.

“If you called me when I was at Coke and said: ‘By the way, do you oppose that I sell my agency to this other guy?’ I wouldn’t have got involved,” he says. “I would have said: ‘You have to do what you have to do.’”

But he leaves the impression he is bored by deals such as this year’s proposed $1.5bn purchase of Grey Global of the US by the UK’s WPP. He doesn’t discount the possibility that WPP will make good on its’ vows to boost profit margins at Grey. He simply sees the effort as dangerous for WPP.

“At the end of the day, they bought revenue. That’s what they did. That’s what they do,” he says. But he adds: “If you are buying earnings because that is the only way you are going to grow, that’s not OK. The question is going to be, is this Grey thing going to be a bridge too far for WPP. It cost a hell of a lot of money.”

Mr Zyman believes advertising agencies face a particularly tough future because much of the work they did in the past is being done by large corporations themselves.

“I think the communication effort, the marketing effort, is being rethought and brought back into the company,” he says. “And more than anything else, it is getting elevated back to the president and the CEO level. People understand that marketing generates growth and growth generates profits.”

Mr Zyman expects corporate attention will have to shift to improving relations with large retailers. He believes the balance of power in marketing has swung decisively to companies such as Wal-Mart of the US, which he describes as “lava, because they are going to burn everyone up”.

First, he says, Wal-Mart put pressure on retail rivals by running a low-cost opera­tion. Then it began to squeeze its suppliers. Now, he believes retailers are so central to the selling process that manufacturers ignore them at their peril.

“To me, the most important opportunity that manufacturers have is to get back to re-establishing relationships with retailers and making sure the retailer understands the position of the brand,” he says. “If the retailer doesn’t understand how Crest toothpaste is positioned – [which is] what it is supposed to do – they are not going to feature it.”

Like many marketers, Mr Zyman is fascinated by the potential of the store as a medium for marketing messages. As television audiences fragment, the audience for particular retail chains is growing. The goal for many retailers is to find ways to keep shoppers in the store longer so they will buy more things.

“What happens in the store plays a vital role in what you are going to buy,” Mr Zyman says. “What we are starting to see is Wal-Mart looking for ways to get [shoppers] back to the centre of the store and away from the perimeter.”

It is not as much fun as bringing a band of singers to an Italian hillside to express their love for humanity. But Mr Zyman’s point is he has done with that sort of thing for now.