Identify a specific tool or technique from those identified in Chapter 19 and discuss how the tool is used in your current or former place of employment

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Principles of accounting II

• Identify a specific tool or technique from those identified in Chapter 19 and discuss how the tool is used in your current or former place of employment.
• As you learned in this unit, management has a portfolio of short-term decisions (choices) that must be made. From your personal or professional experience, discuss how one or two decisions were made. After reviewing this unit’s required unit resources, would you have made a different choice? Why, or why not?

Professionalism in the Work Place

• Do you believe that technology makes communication easier or more challenging? Explain your response.
• If you were to start a new job, what benefit would be most important to you, and why? In your responses to your peers, please expand on their answer.

Advance Marketing

• Review the “Marketing Excellence: The Ritz-Carlton” case study on pp. 425 of your textbook. Bring another hotel into the discussion (either a competitor of Ritz-Carlton or not), and discuss how they maintain their brand promise to their customer base (i.e., their target market). Make certain to select a hotel that has not already been mentioned.

Case Study Marketing Excellence The Ritz-Carlton

Few brands attain such a high standard of customer service as the Ritz-Carlton. This luxury hotel chain began with the original Ritz-Carlton Boston, which revolutionized the way U.S. travelers experienced customer service in a hotel. It was the first of its kind to provide a private bath in each guest room, fresh flowers throughout the hotel, and an entire staff dressed in formal white tie, black tie, or morning-coat attire.

In 1983, hotelier Horst Schulze and a four-person development team acquired the rights to the Ritz-Carlton name and created the concept by which it is known today, with its company-wide concentration on both the personal and the functional side of service. The five-star hotel provides impeccable facilities but also takes customer service extremely seriously. Its credo is “We are Ladies and Gentlemen serving Ladies and Gentlemen.” According to the company’s Web site, The Ritz-Carlton “pledge(s) to provide the finest personal service and facilities for our guests who will always enjoy a warm, relaxed, yet refined ambience.”

The Ritz-Carlton fulfills this promise by providing impeccable training for its employees and executing its Three Steps of Service and 12 Service Values. The Three Steps of Service state that employees must use a warm and sincere greeting always using the guest’s name, anticipate and fulfill each guest’s needs, and give a warm good-bye, again using the guest’s name. Every manager carries a laminated card with the 12 Service Values, which include bullets such as number 3: “I am empowered to create unique, memorable and personal experiences for our guests,” and number 10: “I am proud of my professional appearance, language and behavior.” Simon Cooper, president and chief operating officer, explained, “It’s all about people. Nobody has an emotional experience with a thing. We’re appealing to emotions.” The Ritz-Carlton’s 35,000 employees in 29 countries go out of their way to create unique and memorable experiences for their guests.

Not only is the company known for training its employees to provide impeccable customer service, but it also reinforces its mission and values with them on a daily basis. Each day, managers gather their employees for a 15-minute “line up” to check in, resolve any impending problems, and read and discuss what The Ritz-Carlton calls “wow stories.” These true stories, read to every employee around the world, recognize an individual employee for his or her outstanding customer service and also highlight one of the 12 Service Values.

One family staying at The Ritz-Carlton, Bali, needed a particular type of egg and milk for their son who suffered from food allergies. Employees could not find the appropriate items in town, but the executive chef at the hotel remembered a store in Singapore that sold them. He contacted his mother-in-law, who purchased the items and personally flew them more than 1,000 miles to Bali for the family. This example showcased Service Value 6: “I own and immediately resolve guests’ problems.”

In another instance, a waiter overheard a man telling his wheelchair-bound wife that it was too bad he couldn’t get her down to the beach. The waiter told the maintenance crew, and by the next day they had constructed a wooden walkway to the beach and pitched a tent at the far end where the couple had dinner.

Wow stories can also be as simple as an employee’s remembering how a guest prefers coffee and then preparing it that way without asking for the rest of his or her stay. According to Cooper, the daily wow story is “the best way to communicate what we expect from our ladies and gentlemen around the world. Every story reinforces the actions we are looking for and demonstrates how each and every person in our organization contributes to our service values.” Each employee is empowered to spend as much as $2,000 without management approval to help deliver a guest’s anticipated need or desire, supporting the company’s intention to build lifelong positive relationships with each customer.

Ritz-Carlton measures the success of its customer service efforts through Gallup phone interviews, which ask both functional and emotional questions. Functional questions include: “How was the meal?” or “Was your bedroom clean?” while emotional questions reveal the customer’s sense of well-being. The hotel uses these findings as well as day-to-day experiences to continually enhance and improve the experience for its guests.

In less than three decades, Ritz-Carlton has grown from one U.S. location to 87 in 29 countries; the company plans to expand further throughout Europe, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas. It has also earned two Malcolm Baldrige Quality Awards—the only company ever to win the prestigious award twice.

• Review the “Marketing Excellence: Coca-Cola” case study on pp. 611 of your textbook. In thinking about the great brand success Coca-Cola has experienced, what do they need to think about in the future with respect to communication strategies. Think about both traditional and digital applications and be specific with both media, themes, and timing.

Marketing Excellence Coca-Cola

When it comes to mass marketing, perhaps no one does it better than Coca-Cola. Coke is the most popular and best-selling product in the world. With an annual marketing budget of $3 billion and annual sales exceeding $30 billion, the brand tops the Interbrand ranking of the best brands year after year. Today, the company reaches consumers in more than 200 countries and has a brand value of $79 billion. In fact, it is such a global phenomenon that its name is the second-most understood word in the world (after okay).

The history of Coke’s success is impressive from any perspective. The drink was invented in 1886 by Dr. John S. Pemberton, who mixed a syrup of his own invention with carbonated water to cure headaches. The company’s first president turned the product into a pop culture phenomenon by distributing it to pharmacists around the world and engaging consumers through Coca-Cola–branded clocks, posters, and other paraphernalia.

Coca-Cola believed early on that to gain worldwide acceptance, the brand needed to accomplish two things: connect emotionally and socially with the masses and ensure that it was “within arm’s-length of desire.” So the company focused on gaining extensive distribution and making the product beloved by all. In World War II, it proclaimed, “every man in uniform gets a bottle of Coca-Cola for 5 cents, wherever he is, and whatever it costs the company.” This strategy helped introduce the soft drink around the world as well as connecting consumers emotionally with a positive message during a time of turmoil.

How did Coca-Cola become so much bigger than any of its competitors? The company not only creates uplifting global campaigns better than anyone; it also translates them brilliantly across different countries, languages, and cultures. Coke’s advertising has primarily focused on its ability to quench thirst and connect people no matter who they are or how they live. One of Coca-Cola’s most memorable and successful commercials was called “Hilltop” and featured the song, “I’d like to buy the world a Coke.” Launched in 1971, the ad featured young adults from all over the world sharing a happy moment and a common bond (holding a Coke) on a hillside in Italy. It touched so many consumers that the song became a top-10 hit single later that year.

Coca-Cola’s television commercials still convey the message of universal connection over a Coke. The company’s 2014 Super Bowl ad featured “America the Beautiful” sung in nine different languages—English, Spanish, Tagalog, Mandarin, Hindi, Hebrew, Keres (a language of the Pueblo people), French, and Arabic—showing that people of different ethnicities can connect through their love for the United States and Coca-Cola. Other commercials take a lighthearted tone to appeal to a younger audience. In one spot, a group of young adults sit around a campfire laughing, playing the guitar, and passing around a bottle of Coke. The bottle reaches a slimy, one-eyed alien who takes a sip and passes the bottle along. When the next drinker wipes the slime off in disgust, the music stops and the group stares at him in disappointment. The man hands the bottle back to the alien to get re-slimed and then drinks from it, and the music and the party continue in perfect harmony.

Jonathan Mildenhall, Coca-Cola’s global head of content and advertising, explained the continued importance of TV ads: “The role of TV will never go from the Coca-Cola company; TV has a unique set of attributes in a marketing campaign that other media just cannot give us but I just don’t think it should be the starting point.” The company’s mass communications strategy thus mixes a wide range of media including television, radio, print, social, in-store, digital, billboard, public relations, events, paraphernalia, and even its own museum. Its target audience and reach are so massive that choosing the right media and marketing message is critical, despite having a $3 billion marketing budget.

Coca-Cola uses big events to hit huge audiences; it has sponsored the Olympics since 1928 and advertises during the Super Bowl. The company targets younger consumers through efforts like 1.3 million tweets each quarter and strategic product placements including the judges’ red Coke or Diet Coke cups placed front and center during American Idol. And it spends more than $1 billion a year on sports sponsorships such as NASCAR and the World Cup.

The delicate balance between Coca-Cola’s local and global marketing is crucial; the campaigns must be relevant and translate well on a local scale. In China, for example, the company has given its regional managers control over advertising so they can include appropriate cultural messages. One executive explained, “Creating effective marketing at a local level in the absence of global scale can lead to huge inefficiencies.” In 2006, for example, Coca-Cola ran two campaigns during the FIFA World Cup as well as several local campaigns. In 2010, it ran a single World Cup campaign in more than 100 markets. Company executives estimated that the latter, global, strategy’s efficiency saved it more than $45 million.

Despite its unprecedented success, Coca-Cola is not infallible. In 1985, in perhaps the worst product launch ever, the company introduced New Coke—a sweeter concoction of the original secret formula. Consumers instantly rejected it, and sales plummeted. Three months later, Coca-Cola relaunched the original formula under the name Coca-Cola Classic, to the delight of customers everywhere. Then-CEO Roberto Goizueta stated, “The simple fact is that all the time and money and skill poured into consumer research on the new Coca-Cola could not measure or reveal the deep and abiding emotional attachment to original Coca-Cola felt by so many people.”

Coca-Cola’s success at marketing a product on such a global, massive scale is unique. Despite the ups and downs of soft-drink trends over the years, no brand is so universally available, universally accepted, and universally loved as Coca-Cola.