maandag 2 januari 2012

Memo Report #1

MEMO REPORT

To:                           Board of directors Stitch Wear
From:                      Sander Possel (Head of Public Relations)
Date:                       24 October 2011
Subject:                   Improvement on the CSR profile


Introduction
On 24 October, I have called a meeting with the heads of Production (Rommert Rijpkema) and the head Marketing & Sales (Dion van den Bosch) to discuss and come up with improvements on the CSR profile. The main objective is to improve our public image, due to negative publications about child labour.
No child employmentThe first point that had to be made clear at the meeting was that we must assure that we exclude child employment beneath 14 within our company or our suppliers in the future. We of the PR department came up with several ideas which I proposed at this CBR meeting.
We, as PR, considered that this bad publicity is clandestine and that it will effect our
turnover in a negative way on the short term, but above all, that it will damage our image, which is a long term effect. Firstly, we suggested to fire the few children under 14 in our Asian manufacturers. Furthermore, communication with these factories, our factories, should be closer, given that such decentralisation mistakes must and absolutely may not occur again. Heads of Marketing & Sales and Production both deeply agreed to this. Rommert Rijpkema, Head of Production, brought in an idea to investigate thoroughly if our (Asian) suppliers also exclude child labour under 14 by frequently visiting them unannounced. I would like to display this proposal, and see how we could work this out.
Changing the public imageWe came up with the idea to sponsor an enormous sport event for the youth in conjunction with a couple of professional teenage athletes. This sponsorship would reflect a young, fresh image and would contradict the stories of child labour because of the collaboration with teenage athletes and a sport event directed to youth. For the rest, Dion van den Bosch, Head of Marketing & Sales suggested to change our firm name into Easy Wear in some countries. This will give us a clean sheet in these countries, and in his opinion, would be the most efficient way  to get rid of the bad image. After a long lasting discussion we all agreed, however it is a radical solution that must be discussed further.
Conclusion
To assure that mistakes and bad publicity of this calibre will never occur again, we must tighten our communication with Asian manufacturers by visiting them frequently. To turn the tide, regarding our public image and losing turnover, we should sponsor youth related events and activities, like an enormous sport event. Furthermore, the proposal to change our name in specific countries is radical, but open for further evaluation.
I hope I have informed you well enough about these potential improvements of our CRS profile.

Sander Possel,
Head of Public Relations
Take a careful look at my first memo report for this course, graded with a proper 6.8.
A memo report is a brief report about a meeting/event. I will explain the proceedings regarding this writing assignment. During the tutorials of the course English, we get a certain business case, which we are expected to execute in groups of four. Each student gets a specific role, a representative of a department, for example: head of the department sales. Together you will discuss the problems of the business case and have to find a solution, afterwards you present the outcomes to the board of this particular company in the form of, exactly, a memo report.  During the discussion of the case you have to take action minutes, which are the essential points that you have made , to help writing your memo report.

In this case we represented the clothing company Stitch Wear. Stitch Wear was struggling with its public image because they were accused of child labour. I played the role of the head of public relationships.


Reflection
This was my first written memo report, while I didn´t do the practise memo report before this one.
I must say that I´m absolutely content with the result, however, there is enough to improve. The grades are subdivided in several criteria: structure, range (vocabulary), coherence (flow of text) and accuracy (grammar/misspelling). For these parts I scored respectively a 8, 6, 7, 6, with thus an outcome of 6,8 (8+6+7+6=27/4=6,75=6,8).

If you look at my memo report you can count many r’s and a’s, which are range and accuracy errors. Range errors contain most of the time informal or vague words, or words that are not commonly used in this particular context. To pick out some of these mistakes in my report: ‘child employment beneath 14’, ‘beneath’ should be replaced by ‘under’. ‘We came up with the idea’, which is too informal, a good alternative would be: ‘we developed an idea’.
Accuracy errors represent misspelling, grammatical mistakes or dutchisms (Dutch sayings badly translated to English). Some examples from my memo report: ‘it will effect our turnover
à  ‘it will affect our turnover’. ‘A sport eventà ‘A sports event’. Also an error that can be placed under the category this-doesn’t-make-sense-in-English: ‘To display this proposal’ . In this case it was my tendency to translate ‘voorleggen’, a dutch verb, which I typed in on mijnwoordenboek.nl and ‘to display’ was one of the translations to English. Unfortunately, I was dead wrong.

If I list all my errors in this memo report, I must conclude that there are many mistakes caused by rushing, not scrutinizing the content a second time. These type of errors can be undone easily and are a good learning for next times. Overall looking, I’m very content with the result and will try my best to improve my writing skills for the next memo report.

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