Business reports: body
time to complete: 30 minutes
We are now going to explore the body of the report. We are going to start by looking at the headings. As we have mentioned before, headings are essential when writing a report as they help the reader quickly locate information. Some reports may have fixed headings such as ‘introduction’ ‘literature review’ or ‘findings’; however, that is not the case in many reports. In fact, even if you are using those fixed headings, you might need to write your own subheadings, specifically tailored to the content of your report.
UNSW Business School (no date) offers the following advice when writing your headings.
- Use nouns or noun-phrases to write your headings/subheadings, not full sentences
- Be consistent with your word-class choices as much as possible e.g. Data Collection, Data Analysis (two noun phrases = consistent) vs. Data Collection, Analysing the Data (one noun phrase & one verb phrase = inconsistent)
- Don’t use questions as your headings/subjects.
Task: Answer the following questions to practise identifying whether headings/subheadings are in the correct form.
Headings and subheadings help the reader navigate the text and identify information quickly but also to predict the content of the report’s sections before actually reading them. It is therefore very important that your headings/subheadings reflect the content clearly and accurately. To understand the importance of this, we will now practise identifying the topics of paragraphs by examining the headings/subheadings.
Task: Below are the headings of the report we saw earlier (EMAP’s Launch of Grazia Magazine). Read the headings match them to the question(s) each will address.
Subheadings adapted from the British Academic Written English corpus via Flax
Hopefully, you can now see that if readers want to find information very quickly or an answer to a question, they will use their understanding of the headings to skip to a specific part of the report. Let’s practise this once more, but this time we will focus on an extract of the report and its subheadings.
Task: Read the Marketing Mix section of the same report (click below to reveal text) and come up with four subheadings that would complete the four gaps. Then, compare your subheadings with our answer key and explanation.
_____?_____
The design Grazia has adopted is very distinct. All editions to date have brightly coloured lettering with a distinctive celebrity on the cover. By doing this, they are creating a diverse and instantly recognisable brand that stands out amongst the other competition. Those consumers that become brand loyal to Grazia will, as a result, instantly buy it without browsing its content list.
The cover’s marketing message is a mix of its weekly content with a new celebrity on the cover each week. This is combined with an extensive celebrity interview inside the magazine as well as articles on the hot buys of the week in accessories, beauty and fashion.
The Chief Executive of Emap has already discovered “there is a very clear understanding about the Grazia brand and how it should be delivered” (Paul Keenan, Media Week). However, the brand is an established Italian one and therefore needs adaptation to fit the British market. The new brand of Grazia for Emap is likely to expand its product portfolio. If, using the a strategic tool such as the Boston Matrix, it establishes that Emap already have profitable ‘stars’ and ‘cash cows’ with good sales figures for 2004 (see appendix)’Heat'(1886,000 copies), ‘Closer’ (1044,000 copies), and the monthlies ‘New Women’ (799,000 copies) and ‘Top Sante’ (426,000 copies). These products are either in the Growth or Maturity stages with successful sales and good profit. This, then, allows Emap to ‘invest their profit into a new product that is about to enter the introductory stage’ (Naylor, 1999), this being Grazia.
_____?_____
Emap will want to market Grazia as representing good value for money. However, this does not necessarily mean that it needs to be the cheapest available. In fact, it would be counter-productive because the objective is to attract upmarket consumers. The main tenet of their marketing concept will be that most of their customers are prepared to pay a little more for something that works really well for them. If the product is good value, the reader will remain loyal whereas bad pricing will cause the consumer to look elsewhere. Because Grazia is a niche, it is difficult to create a competitive pricing strategy. This is especially true because it seems most of its competition will be monthlies. Emap therefore needed to be careful in establishing that Grazia represents good value. As the current weekly price of £1.50 (although a promotional offer in the free preview issue to get the first issue for half price at 75p) equates to £6.00 a month, this means that it is very expensive in comparisons to some other competitors such as ‘Glamour’ and ‘Marie Claire’ are only £1.95 and £2.50 suggesting that they are better value for money.
_____?_____
Grazia is currently being sold in most supermarkets and newsagents throughout the UK. When a new magazine is launched, the type of establishment in which it is sold is not an issue but the geographical location of that establishment might be. It will be Emap’s responsibility to make the product widely available in all establishments in which the competitive magazines are sold. If Emap has researched correctly and therefore knows where their potential consumers live within the UK, they may target the highest population regions and focus on achieving more outlets in order to generate higher sales.
_____?_____
Emap has launched a massive £16 million advertising campaign in order to raise awareness of the new product to the right consumer. In television and radio campaigns and on posters and billboards (see appendix) .In outlets such as W H Smith, promotional staff handed out free preview issues of Grazia in the week before its launch on the 21 st of February 2005.
The television advertisements have continued past the launch and have continued to grow in volume since they began on the 11 th of February. There are many programmes all aimed at the target consumer that that have carried Grazia (see appendix). Most of the airings have been during the daytime television slots.
Grazia has also established its own catchy slogans to differentiate itself from its competitors ‘Worth not waiting for’ (on the posters), and “Impatience is a virtue” (for radio and television). They have also advertised Grazia through spokesperson appearances on television programmes on a popular channel 4 television show ‘make me a supermodel’ (see appendix).
Text adapted from the British Academic Written English corpus via Flax
You can now compare your answers with the ones below. Click on each subheading to reveal the answer as well as some language we highlighted to help you see what the topic of the paragraph/section is.
Answer key and explanation
Product
The design Grazia has adopted is very distinct. All editions to date have brightly coloured lettering with a distinctive celebrity on the cover. By doing this, they are creating a diverse and instantly recognisable brand that stands out amongst the other competition. Those consumers that become brand loyal to Grazia will, as a result, instantly buy it without browsing its content list.
The cover‘s marketing message is a mix of its weekly content with a new celebrity on the cover each week. This is combined with an extensive celebrity interview inside the magazine as well as articles on the hot buys of the week in accessories, beauty and fashion.
The Chief Executive of Emap has already discovered “there is a very clear understanding about the Grazia brand and how it should be delivered” (Paul Keenan, Media Week). However, the brand is an established Italian one and therefore needs adaptation to fit the British market. The new brand of Grazia for Emap is likely to expand its product portfolio. If, using the a strategic tool such as the Boston Matrix, it establishes that Emap already have profitable ‘stars’ and ‘cash cows’ with good sales figures for 2004 (see appendix) ‘Heat'(1886,000 copies), ‘Closer’ (1044,000 copies), and the monthlies ‘New Women’ (799,000 copies) and ‘Top Sante’ (426,000 copies). These products are either in the Growth or Maturity stages with successful sales and good profit. This, then, allows Emap to ‘invest their profit into a new product that is about to enter the introductory stage’ (Naylor, 1999), this being Grazia.
Price
Emap will want to market Grazia as representing good value for money. However, this does not necessarily mean that it needs to be the cheapest available. In fact, it would be counter-productive because the objective is to attract upmarket consumers. The main tenet of their marketing concept will be that most of their customers are prepared to pay a little more for something that works really well for them. If the product is good value, the reader will remain loyal whereas bad pricing will cause the consumer to look elsewhere. Because Grazia is a niche, it is difficult to create a competitive pricing strategy. This is especially true because it seems most of its competition will be monthlies. Emap therefore needed to be careful in establishing that Grazia represents good value. As the current weekly price of £1.50 (although a promotional offer in the free preview issue to get the first issue for half price at 75p) equates to £6.00 a month, this means that it is very expensive in comparisons to some other competitors such as ‘Glamour’ and ‘Marie Claire’ are only £1.95 and £2.50 suggesting that they are better value for money.
Place
Grazia is currently being sold in most supermarkets and newsagents throughout the UK. When a new magazine is launched, the type of establishment in which it is sold is not an issue but the geographical location of that establishment might be. It will be Emap’s responsibility to make the product widely available in all establishments in which the competitive magazines are sold. If Emap has researched correctly and therefore knows where their potential consumers live within the UK, they may target the highest population regions and focus on achieving more outlets in order to generate higher sales.
Promotion
Emap has launched a massive £16 million advertising campaign in order to raise awareness of the new product to the right consumer. In television and radio campaigns and on posters and billboards (see appendix). In outlets such as WHSmith, promotional staff handed out free preview issues of Grazia in the week before its launch on the 21 st of February 2005.
The television advertisements have continued past the launch and have continued to grow in volume since they began on the 11th of February. There are many programmes all aimed at the target consumer that that have carried Grazia (see appendix). Most of the airings have been during the daytime television slots.
Grazia has also established its own catchy slogans to differentiate itself from its competitors ‘Worth not waiting for’ (on the posters), and “Impatience is a virtue” (for radio and television). They have also advertised Grazia through spokesperson appearances on television programmes on a popular Channel 4 television show ‘Make me a supermodel’ (see appendix).
Adapted from the British Academic Written English corpus via Flax
Final note
At the point, it is important to note that the organisation of ideas in your report as well as your choice of headings/subheadings are directly related to your discipline. In other words, the aspects from which writers examine the topic match methods of analysis from their field of studies. You might or might not be familiar with this, but the four subheadings we saw earlier Product, Price, Place and Promotion are a concept known as the 4 Ps of marketing. So, you can see that the writer did not organise the ideas or choose the subheadings randomly, but instead applied methods of analysis used in their discipline.