Week 8 – Practice test 9

Internal and External Marketing

A

Employees need to hear the same messages that you send out to the marketplace. At most companies, however,
internal and external communications are often mismatched. This can be very confusing, and it threatens
employees’ perceptions of the company’s integrity: They are told one thing by management but observe that
a different message is being sent to the public. One health insurance company, for instance, advertised that the
welfare of patients was the company’s number one priority, while employees were told that their main goal
was to increase the value of their stock options through cost reductions. And one major financial services
institution told customers that it was making a major shift in focus from being a financial retailer to a financial
adviser, but, a year later, research showed that the customer experience with the company had not changed. It
turned out that company leaders had not made an effort to sell the change internally, so employees were still
churning out transactions and hadn’t changed their behavior to match their new adviser role.

Enabling employees to deliver on customer expectations is important, of course, but it’s not the only reason a
company needs to match internal and external messages. Another reason is to help push the company to
achieve goals that might otherwise be out of reach. In 1997, when IBM launched its e-business campaign
(which is widely credited for turning around the company’s image), it chose to ignore research that suggested
consumers were unprepared to embrace IBM as a leader in e-business. Although to the outside world this
looked like an external marketing effort, IBM was also using the campaign to align employees around the idea
of the Internet as the future of technology. The internal campaign changed the way employees thought about
everything they did, from how they named products to how they organized staff to how they approached
selling. The campaign was successful largely because it gave employees a sense of direction and purpose,
which in turn restored their confidence in IBM’s ability to predict the future and lead the technology industry.
Today, research shows that people are four times more likely to associate the term “e-business” with IBM than
with its nearest competitor, Microsoft.

The type of “two-way branding” that IBM did so successfully strengthens both sides of the equation. Internal
marketing becomes stronger because it can draw on the same “big idea” as advertising. Consumer marketing
becomes stronger because the messages are developed based on employees’ behavior and attitudes, as well as
on the company’s strengths and capabilities – indeed, the themes are drawn from the company’s very soul.
This process can result in a more distinct advertising idea because marketers are more likely to create a
message that’s unique to the company.

Perhaps even more important, by taking employees into account, a company can avoid creating a message that
doesn’t resonate with staff or, worse, one that builds resentment. In 1996, United Airlines shelved its “Come
Fly the Friendly Skies” slogan when presented with a survey that revealed the depth of customer resentment
toward the airline industry. In an effort to own up to the industry’s shortcomings, United launched a new
campaign, “Rising,” in which it sought to differentiate itself by acknowledging poor service and promising
incremental improvements such as better meals. While this was a logical premise for the campaign given the
tenor of the times, a campaign focusing on customers’ distaste for flying was deeply discouraging to the staff.
Employee resentment ultimately made it impossible for United to deliver the improvements it was promising,
which in turn undermined the “Rising” pledge. Three years later, United decided employee opposition was
undermining its success and pulled the campaign. It has since moved to a more inclusive brand message with
the line “United,” which both audiences can embrace. Here, a fundamental principle of advertising – find and
address a customer concern – failed United because it did not consider the internal market.

When it comes to execution, the most common and effective way to link internal and external marketing
campaigns is to create external advertising that targets both audiences. IBM used this tactic very effectively
when it launched its e-business campaign. It took out an eight-page ad in the Wall Street Journal declaring its
new vision, a message directed at both customers and internal stakeholders. This is an expensive way to capture
attention, but if used sparingly, it is the most powerful form of communication; in fact, you need do it only
once for everyone in the company to read it. There’s a symbolic advantage as well. Such a tactic signals that
the company is taking its pledge very seriously; it also signals transparency – the same message going out to
both audiences.

F
Advertising isn’t the only way to link internal and external marketing. At Nike, a number of senior executives
now hold the additional title of “Corporate Storyteller.” They deliberately avoid stories of financial successes
and concentrate on parables of “just doing it,” reflecting and reinforcing the company’s ad campaigns. One
tale, for example, recalls how legendary coach and Nike co-founder Bill Bowerman, in an effort to build a
better shoe for his team, poured rubber into the family waffle iron, giving birth to the prototype of Nike’s
famous Waffle Sole. By talking about such inventive moves, the company hopes to keep the spirit of
innovation that characterizes its ad campaigns alive and well within the company.

But while their messages must be aligned, companies must also keep external promises a little ahead of internal
realities. Such promises provide incentives for employees and give them something to live up to. In the 1980s,
Ford turned “Quality is Job!” from an internal rallying cry into a consumer slogan in response to the threat
from cheaper, more reliable Japanese cars. It did so before the claim was fully justified, but by placing it in
the public arena, it gave employees an incentive to match the Japanese. If the promise is pushed too far ahead,
however, it loses credibility. When a beleaguered British Rail launched a campaign announcing service
improvement under the banner “We’re Getting There,” it did so prematurely. By drawing attention to the gap
between the promise and the reality, it prompted destructive press coverage. This, in turn, demoralized staff,
who had been legitimately proud of the service advances they had made.

Questions 1-7

Use the information in the passage to match the company (listed A-F) with correct category or deeds below.
Write the appropriate letters A-F in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet.
NB You may use any letter more than once.
A legendary anecdote inspire employee successfully
B advertisement campaign inspire employees and ensure a leading role in business
C improper ads campaign brings negative effect
D internal and external announcement are different
E campaign brings positive and realistic expectation internally
F a bad slogan that failed both to win support internally and raise standard to its poor service
1 One health insurance Company
2 British Rail
3 IBM
4 United Airline
5 A financial service company
6 A Shoemaking company (Nike)
7 The Company of (Ford)
Questions 8-11
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage? In boxes 9-11 on your
answer sheet, write:

TRUE if the statement is true

FALSE if the statement is false
NOT GIVEN if the information is not given in the passage

8 Employers in almost all companies successfully make their employees fully understand the outside
campaign.
9 Current IBM is more prominent in the area of E-business.
10 United Airline finally gave up an ads slogan due to a survey in 1996.
11 Nike had improved company performance through telling employees legendary corporation stories.

Questions 12-13

Choose TWO correct letters below

Write your answers in boxes 12-13 on your answer sheet.
Please choose TWO approaches in the passage mentioned that were employed as company strategy:

A promoting the visual effect of their products’ advertisement

B launching inspiring campaigns internally
C introducing inner competition
D learning how to sell stories among senior executives
E applying an appropriate slogan

The importance of law

A The law influences all of us virtually all the time, it governs almost all aspects of our behavior, and even
what happens to us when we are no longer alive. It affects us from the embryo onwards. It governs the air we
breathe, the food and drink we consume, our travel, family relationships, and our property. It applies at the
bottom of the ocean and in space.

Each time we examine a label on a food product, engage in work as an employee or employer, travel on the
roads, go to school to learn or to teach, stay in a hotel, borrow a library book, create or dissolve a commercial
company, play sports, or engage the services of someone for anything from plumbing a sink to planning a city,
we are in the world of law.

B Law has also become much more widely recognised as the standard by which behavior needs to be judged.
A very telling development in recent history is the way in which the idea of law has permeated all parts of
social life. The universal standard of whether something is socially tolerated is progressively becoming
whether it is legal, rather than something that has always been considered acceptable. In earlier times, most
people were illiterate.

Today, by contrast, a vast number of people can read, and it is becoming easier for people to take an interest
in law, and for the general population to help actually shape the law in many countries. However, law is a
versatile instrument that can be used equally well for the improvement or the degradation of humanity.

C This, of course, puts law in a very significant position. In our rapidly developing world, all sorts of skills
and knowledge are valuable. Those people, for example, with knowledge of computers, the internet, and
communications technology are relied upon by the rest of us. There is now someone with IT skills or an IT
help desk in every UK school, every company, every hospital, every local and central government office.
Without their knowledge, many parts of commercial and social life today would seize up in minutes. But legal
understanding is just as vital and as universally needed. The American comedian Jerry Seinfeld put it like this,
'We are all throwing the dice, playing the game, moving our pieces around the board, but if there is a problem,
the lawyer is the only person who has read the inside of the top of the box.' In other words, the lawyer is the
only person who has read and made sense of the rules.

D The number of laws has never been greater. In the UK alone, about 35 new Acts of Parliament are produced
every year, thereby delivering thousands of new rules. The legislative output of the British Parliament has
more than doubled in recent times from 1,100 pages a year in the early 1970s, to over 2,500 pages a year today.
Between 1997 and 2006, the legislature passed 365 Acts of Parliament and more than 32,000 legally binding
statutory instruments. In a system with so much law, lawyers do a great deal not just to vindicate the rights of
citizens and organizations but also to help develop the law through legal arguments, some of which are adapted
by judges to become laws. Law courts can and do produce new law and revise old law, but they do so having
heard the arguments of lawyers.

E However, despite their important role in developing the rules, lawyers are not universally admired. Anti-
lawyer jokes have a long history going back to the ancient Greeks. More recently the son of a famous
Hollywood actor was asked at his junior school what his father did for a living, to which he replied, 'My daddy
is a movie actor, and sometimes he plays the good guy, and sometimes he plays the lawyer. For balance,
though, it Is worth remembering that there are and have been many heroic and revered lawyers such as the
Roman philosopher and politician Cicero and Mahatma Gandi, the Indian campaigner for independence.

F People sometimes make comments that characterise lawyers as professionals whose concerns put personal
reward above truth, or who gain financially from misfortune. There are undoubtedly lawyers that would fit
that bill, just as there are some scientists, journalists and others in that category. But, in general, it is no more
just to say that lawyers are bad because they make a living from people's problems than it is to make the same
accusation in respect of nurses or IT consultants. A great many lawyers are involved in public law work, such
as that involving civil liberties, housing and other issues. Such work is not lavishly remunerated, and the
quality of the service provided by these lawyers relies on considerable professional dedication. Moreover,
much legal work has nothing to do with conflict or misfortune but is primarily concerned with drafting
documents. Another source of social disaffection for lawyers, and disaffection for the law, is a limited public
understanding of how law works and how It could be changed. Greater clarity about these issues, maybe as a
result of better public relations, would reduce many aspects of public dissatisfaction with the law.

Questions 14-19

Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs A-F

Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below. Write the correct number, i-
viii, in boxes 14-19 on your answer sheet.

List of Headings
i Different areas of professional expertise
ii Reasons why it is unfair to criticise lawyers
iii The disadvantages of the legal system
iv The law applies throughout our lives
v The law has affected historical events
vi A negative regard for lawyers
vii public's increasing ability to influence the law
vili Growth in laws
14 Paragraph A
15 Paragraph B
16 Paragraph C
17 Paragraph D
18 Paragraph E
19 Paragraph F
Questions 20-21

Choose TWO letters, A-E.

Write the correct letters in boxes 20-21 on your answer sheet.
Which TWO of the following statements does the writer make about legal skills in today's world?
A There should be a person with legal training in every hospital.
B Lawyers with experience in commercial law are the most in demand.
C Knowledge of the law is as important as having computer skills.
D Society could not function effectively without legal experts.
E Schools should teach students about the law.
Questions 22-26
Complete the summary below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 22-26 on your answer sheet.
Lawyers as professionals People sometimes say that 22_____________ is of little interest to lawyers, who
are more concerned with making money. This may well be the case with some individuals, in the same way
that some 23______________or scientific experts may also be driven purely by financial greed. However,
criticising lawyers because their work is concerned with people's problems would be similar to attacking IT
staff or 24_______________ for the same reason. In fact, many lawyers focus on questions relating, for
example, to housing or civil liberties, which requires them to have 25_____________ to their work. What's
more, a lot of lawyers' time is spent writing 26_______________ rather than dealing with people's
misfortunes.

Paper or Computer?
A. Computer technology was supposed to replace paper. But that hasn’t happened. Every country in the
Western world uses more paper today, on a per- capita basis, than it did ten years ago. The consumption of
uncoated free-sheet paper, for instance the most common kind of office paper — rose almost fifteen per cent
in the United States between 1995 and 2000. This is generally taken as evidence of how hard it is to eradicate
old, wasteful habits and of how stubbornly resistant we are to the efficiencies offered by computerization. A
number of cognitive psychologists and ergonomics experts, however, don’t agree. Paper has persisted, they
argue, for very good reasons: when it comes to performing certain kinds of cognitive tasks, paper has many
advantages over computers. The dismay people feel at the sight of a messy desk — or the spectacle of air-
traffic controllers tracking flights through notes scribbled on paper strips – arises from a fundamental
confusion about the role that paper plays in our lives.

B. The case for paper is made most eloquently in “The Myth of the Paperless Office”, by two social scientists,
Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper. They begin their book with an account of a study they conducted at the
International Monetary Fund, in Washington, DC. Economists at the I.M.F. spend most of their time writing
reports on complicated economic questions, work that would seem to be perfectly suited to sitting in front of
a computer. Nonetheless, the I.M.F. is awash in paper, and Sellen and Harper wanted to find out why. Their
answer is that the business of writing reports – at least at the I.M.F. is an intensely collaborative process,
involving the professional judgments and contributions of many people. The economists bring drafts of reports
to conference rooms, spread out the relevant pages, and negotiate changes with one other. They go back to
their offices and jot down comments in the margin, taking advantage of the freedom offered by the informality
of the handwritten note. Then they deliver the annotated draft to the author in person, taking him, page by
page, through the suggested changes. At the end of the process, the author spreads out all the pages with
comments on his desk and starts to enter them on the computer — moving the pages around as he works,
organizing and reorganizing, saving and discarding.
C. Without paper, this kind of collaborative and iterative work process would be much more difficult.
According to Sellen and Harper, paper has a unique set of “affordances” — that is, qualities that permit specific
kinds of uses. Paper is tangible: we can pick up a document, flip through it, read little bits here and there, and
quickly get a sense of it. Paper is spatially flexible, meaning that we can spread it out and arrange it in the way
that suits US best. And it’s tailorable: we can easily annotate it, and scribble on it as we read, without altering
the original text. Digital documents, of course, have then own affordances. They can be easily searched, shared,
stored, accessed remotely, and linked to other relevant material. But they lack the affordances that really matter
to a group of people working together on a report. Sellen and Harper write:

D. Paper enables a certain kind of thinking. Picture, for instance, the top of your desk. Chances are that you
have a keyboard and a computer screen off to one side, and a clear space roughly eighteen inches square in
front of your chair. What covers the rest of the desktop is probably piles- piles of papers, journals, magazines,
binders, postcards, videotapes, and all the other artifacts of the knowledge economy. The piles look like a
mess, but they aren’t. When a group at Apple Computer studied piling behavior several years ago, they found
that even the most disorderly piles usually make perfect sense to the piler, and that office workers could hold
forth in great detail about the precise history and meaning of their piles. The pile closest to the cleared,
eighteen-inch-square working area, for example, generally represents the most urgent business, and within that
pile the most important document of all is likely to be at the top. Piles are living, breathing archives. Over
time, they get broken down and resorted, sometimes chronologically and sometimes thematically and
sometimes chronologically and thematically; clues about certain documents may be physically embedded in
the file by, say, stacking a certain piece of paper at an angle or inserting dividers into the stack.

E. But why do we pile documents instead of filing them? Because piles represent the process of active, ongoing
thinking. The psychologist Alison Kidd, whose research Sellen and Harper refer to extensively, argues that
“knowledge workers” use the physical space of the desktop to hold “ideas which they cannot yet categorize or
even decide how they might use.” The messy desk is not necessarily a sign of disorganization. It may be a sign
of complexity: those who deal with many unresolved ideas simultaneously cannot sort and file the papers on
their desks, because they haven’t yet sorted and filed the ideas in their head. Kidd writes that many of the
people she talked to use the papers on their desks as contextual cues to’’ recover a complex set of threads
without difficulty and delay” when they come in on a Monday morning, or after their work has been interrupted
by a phone call. What we see when we look at the piles on our desks is, in a sense, the contents of our brains.

F. This idea that paper facilitates a highly specialized cognitive and social process is a far cry from the way
we have historically thought about the stuff. Paper first began to proliferate in the workplace in the late
nineteenth century as part of the move toward “systematic management.” To cope with the complexity of the
industrial economy, managers were instituting company-wide policies and demanding monthly, weekly, or
even daily updates from their subordinates. Thus was born the monthly sales report, and the office manual and
the internal company newsletter. The typewriter took off in the eighteen-eighties, making it possible to create
documents in a fraction of the time it had previously taken, and that was followed closely by the advent of
carbon paper, which meant that a typist could create ten copies of that document simultaneously. Paper was
important not to facilitate creative collaboration and thought but as an instrument of control.

Questions 27-32

The reading passage has seven paragraphs, A-F

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs A-F from the list below. Write the correct number i-xi in boxes
27-32 on your answer sheet.
List of Headings
i Paper continued as a sharing or managing must
ii. Piles can be more inspiring rather than disorganizing
iii. Favorable situation that economists used paper pages
iv. Overview of an unexpected situation: paper survived
v. Comparison between efficiencies for using paper and using computer
 vi. IMF paperless office seemed to be a waste of papers
vii. Example of failure for avoidance of paper record
viii. There are advantages of using a paper in offices
ix. Piles reflect certain characteristics in people’ thought
x. Joy of having the paper square in front of computer

27. Paragraph A
28. Paragraph B
29. Paragraph C
30. Paragraph D
31. Paragraph E
32. Paragraph F

Questions 33-36

Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage 3, using NO MORE THAN
THREE WORDS from Reading Passage 3 for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 33-36 on your
answer sheet.

Compared with digital documents, paper has several advantages. First it allows clerks to work in a
33__________. way among colleagues. Next, paper is not like virtual digital versions, it’s 34_________.
Finally, because it is 35__________, note or comments can be effortlessly added as related information.
However, shortcoming comes at the absence of convenience on task which is for a 36__________.

Questions 37-40

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

Write your answers in boxes 37-40 on your answer sheet.

37. What do the economists from IMF say that their way of writing documents?
A They note down their comments for freedom on the drafts.
B They finish all writing individually.
C They share ideas on before electronic version was made.
D They use electronic version fully.
38. What is the implication of the “Piles” mentioned in the passage?
A They have underlying orders.
B They are necessarily a mess.
C They are in time sequence order.
D They are in alphabetic order.
39. What does the manager believe in sophisticated economy?
A Recorded paper can be as management tool.
B Carbon paper should be compulsory.
C Teamwork is the most important.
D Monthly report is the best way.
40. According to the end of this passage, what is the reason why paper is not replaced by electronic vision?
A Paper is inexpensive to buy.
B It contributed to management theories in western countries.
C People need time for changing their old habit.
D It is collaborative and functional for tasks implement and management.