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This TMA is marked out of 100 and accounts for 10 per cent of your marks for the module.
TMA 01 is based on Sessions 1–3 of the module. It is intended to develop and assess case study reading skills, note-making and summarising. Your work on TMA 01 will form a part of your preparation for TMA 02, which is a case study analysis. Your notes from TMA 01 will be useful for TMA 02.
Information about the presentation and format of your TMAs can be found in the Assessment Guide.
This TMA is intended to assess the following:
You work for a company called HMV, a music retail chain in the UK. Read the case study below and identify the main points. Create a set of up to six presentation slides that summarise these main points to send to one of your senior colleagues who is new to the company.
You will not be required to speak, so these slides need to contain all the key information from the case study and need to be written clearly so that your colleague can understand it.
The total number of words in your entire presentation should be between 150 and 200 words. This word count is NOT per slide. The usual allowance of 10 per cent above or below the word limit does not apply to this TMA.
You will also need to produce a title slide, and a final slide showing a full reference for the case study, source information for any images used, and the word count. These title and reference slides do not contribute to either the slide count or the word count.
HMV faces the music in Christmas crunch test
Since Doug Putman rescued UK music retailer HMV in February, he has thrown himself wholeheartedly into running a transatlantic retail empire.
The Canadian businessman has found himself jetting back and forth between his Ontario-based Sunrise Records chain and his newer acquisition. On average, he spends one week a month in the UK. ‘I must do about 500,000 air miles a year,’ he says. Now he faces his latest challenge, the all-important Christmas period. ‘That’s crunch time,’ he says. ‘All the hard work you do for 10 months of the year, that period is when you see it come to fruition and you see how good a job you did.’
A lot is riding on the chain’s performance over the festive season. HMV has twice fallen into administration, in 2013 and 2018, and Mr Putman acknowledges that many people didn’t expect his relaunch to last six months. After all, there have been plenty of casualties in the sector. At the start of the twenty-first century, there were a number of other big retailers selling records and CDs, including Virgin, Our Price, Tower and Fopp. But now, although many local independent shops are still in robust health, HMV is the only national chain standing, with Fopp as its wholly-owned subsidiary.
(Source: Getty Images)
Poor Christmas sales have capsized many a High Street retailer in recent years, but Mr Putman is pinning his hopes on the chain’s ‘loyal fan base’ and the changes he has been making. As he sees it, many shops have run into trouble by trying to be all things to all people.
‘I think stores trying to appeal to everyone are really getting left behind,’ he told the BBC. ‘If your goal in life is to make everyone like you, that's not going to happen. We have to identify the core customers, make sure we know what they expect from us and deliver on that.’ So who are those core customers? Young or old? ‘It’s not about their age, it's about what they're into,’ he says. ‘We have a younger generation coming in to buy K-Pop and vinyl. It’s about people who want something tangible, who appreciate physical formats and talking to the staff - it’s the personal touch. They want something physical, whether it’s for gift-giving or collecting.’
Under Mr Putman’s ownership, stores have given more space to vinyl albums and displayed them prominently, although he admits that CDs are still bigger than vinyl for HMV. In a music industry that is increasingly dominated by streaming, record shops have to be attuned to changing trends in physical formats.
Reflecting the vinyl revival is one of a number of ‘easy wins’ that Mr Putman says he has achieved in the past seven months. Others include displaying staff picks in stores and allowing individual stores to go their own way in terms of choosing the right stock for their local customers. ‘I don't believe in taking away too much control from stores and micro-managing from head office. If your customers want more metal, let’s get more metal,’ he says. ‘Its about allowing stores to create their own assortment mix. When I’m doing my store visits, I’m seeing it change.’
Looking ahead, Mr Putman wants to establish HMV as the trusted gatekeeper in a crowded cultural environment. ‘We need to be the expert in the entertainment field. We need to cut through the noise,’ he says. ‘We can say, here are the 100 songs that are really interesting, here are the albums that are worth listening to. It’s a bit overwhelming at times: what movie, what show do I want to watch? These are small things that we need to do better.’
HMV now has 113 shops, but is suffering from the lack of a big central London outlet since the closure of the heavily loss-making flagship store in Oxford Street in the wake of Mr Putman’s takeover. ‘We're just trying to find a location that makes sense. Oxford Street was a very, very big location, but we couldn’t make the financials work. If we can find that right location, we will certainly be back,’ he says.
New shops are already coming to other cities, with a 25,000 sq-ft store known as the HMV Vault now open in Birmingham. This boasts ‘an unrivalled range’ of music and DVDs, plus a permanent stage area and PA (public address) sound system, in line with Mr Putman’s intention to make the stores more exciting’. Also in the run-up to Christmas, HMV’s online store and its Purehmv loyalty card scheme are being revived.
‘We’re lucky to be in an industry that you’re either passionate about it or you’re not. That’s been its strength from day one. It attracts people who love talking about film or music,’ he says. But even if HMV is making progress, Mr Putman knows he cannot afford to become complacent. ‘The minute you feel you’re exactly where you need to be and nothing needs to change, that’s when you start falling into problems,’ he says. ‘You need to be always changing, while staying authentic to what you are.’
However, retail analyst Richard Hyman questioned whether the business would continue to progress when having to fight against online giants such as Amazon. ‘The challenges facing HMV are that the product is the same wherever you buy it from,’ he said. ‘Increasingly in retail, it’s going to be difficult selling someone else’s product. Things like scale become the main differentiator. Only one person can be the cheapest and have the best and most convenient delivery.’
Mr Hyman said the trouble with offering a wide range of products and having ‘fantastic’ customer service was that ‘they will kill your trading economics because they are both very expensive. Back in the day, when retail was less cut-throat and before the internet came along, that was a viable store,’ he said. ‘That has become increasingly difficult when your main competitor has got the scale to blow you out of the water.’
He added that the UK retail market was the ‘toughest on the planet’, in part due to the ease with which retail firms could enter the market by buying an off-the-shelf website and partly due to softer consumer demand.
(Source: adapted from Plummer, 2019)
Follow these guidelines to help you as you write your TMA:
Marking criteria
References
Plummer, R. (2019) ‘HMV faces the music in Christmas crunch test’, BBC News, 8 December [Online]. Available at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-49787061 (Accessed 20 January 2020).
Introduction
The author for this session is Nel Boswood.
Learning how to distill information into a set of coherent points and organising them clearly is an essential skill in business and management. You might be required, for example, to summarise a report for your boss or provide colleagues with the essential information from a presentation you have attended.
In this session you learn how to make good notes from a text or an event and then communicate those points to others. This involves capturing the important information and organising so that it is clear and coherent.
This work will prepare you for TMA 01, so it is important to participate in the group activities to cover the learning fully.
By the end of the session you should be able to:
Looking closely at the grammar of a sentence can be a useful way of identifying the most important words to note down.
[The information on nouns given in this paragraph is also included in Book 1: Handbook for Business Communication.]
One useful tip to keep in mind for note making is that many of the words that you select as main points are nouns. This is because nouns carry most of the meaning in a sentence. As nouns are words that name things, they tell you who or what the writer is talking about in a sentence, who performs the actions and who or what is affected by the actions. Some nouns are physical things, for example ‘coffee’, ‘farmer’, ‘crop’. These are known as concrete nouns. Some nouns are not physical things that you can see or touch; they are more like ideas or processes, for example ‘crisis’, ‘quality’ or ‘production’. These are known as abstract nouns. Abstract nouns are very common in academic business language as they are used to encapsulate key concepts and ideas. It is important to recognise them and to use them in your writing as they help you to be succinct and precise.
Look again at the notes from the introduction, first shown in the screencast and repeated below, and highlight the nouns. Highlight the concrete nouns in one colour and the abstract nouns in another.
To use the highlight tool, first select a pen by clicking on the appropriate one for the category you are identifying, then click on the item you wish to highlight in the text. To highlight multiple words hold the shift key down and drag across the words you wish to highlight. Should you wish to remove highlighting, either click again on the word(s) in question, or select the eraser button and likewise click on the word(s).
If you are accessing this activity using the keyboard, you can tab through the pens, eraser and any text available to highlight. You can select or deselect any of those by pressing the enter key.
2.2.2 Practising using noun phrases
(Allow 15 minutes)
Activity 2.5
[Further details on grammar terminology for business texts are included in Book 1: Handbook for Business Communication.]
Look at the following sentences which give some general information about Cafédirect (Cafédirect, 2012). Use noun phrases to make concise notes on the main point from each sentence in the boxes provided.
Example
Cafédirect has a unique business model with a dynamic mission to change lives and build communities.
To date, Cafédirect has invested the equivalent of more than 50 per cent of its profits in programmes designed to increase skills, improve quality, protect the environment and build communities for the producer partners.
A verb is a word that expresses an action (e.g. walk, talk, think) or a state (be, seem, exist). In business language, verbs often refer to actions and processes that can seem quite abstract, for example in the sentence ‘an environmental crisis is threatening coffee production’. The verb ‘threatening’ succinctly captures many concrete details of the situation and communicates the overall picture to the reader.
Look at the following notes from the introduction again and this time highlight the verbs.
How to use the highlighting tool
To use the highlight tool, first select a pen by clicking on the appropriate one for the category you are identifying, then click on the item you wish to highlight in the text. To highlight multiple words hold the shift key down and drag across the words you wish to highlight. Should you wish to remove highlighting, either click again on the word(s) in question, or select the eraser button and likewise click on the word(s).
If you are accessing this activity using the keyboard, you can tab through the pens, eraser and any text available to highlight. You can select or deselect any of those by pressing the enter key.
The relevance of grammar to note making is that a sentence in a written text will always have at least one noun and one verb. However, when you make notes you can often reduce the sentences to nouns. There are two reasons for this:[
[This text on grammar and note making is also included in Book 1: Handbook for Business Communication.]
There is always a main noun in a noun phrase. The main nouns have been italicised in the two examples just given. The other words are combined with this main noun to make the noun phrase. These combinations are very useful in note making and in writing generally.
Long description
The first thing to consider is how to present information visually using presentation slides. This format is often used as a way of communicating information succinctly in the workplace, usually accompanied by an oral presentation. In this session, you will practise creating slides, but you will not be required to present information orally; that aspect of presenting will be covered later in the module. The focus here is on creating effective slides for your purpose.
Presentations as a medium of communication are used to convey key ideas and usually involve a sequence of slides.
[For those who are new to creating PowerPoint slides, you may find the information on this website helpful: How to create a PowerPoint presentation.]
The slides can be provided electronically after the event (and printed) to replace a formal report and become the focus of the communication as they provide a clear, concise and often colourful way to present visual information like financial figures. In addition, slides can include embedded videos, such as YouTube and TED Talks, to illustrate key points. With the advent of virtual working, presentations are often delivered as ‘webinars’, with slides and videos. They can be recorded and uploaded to websites to watch later. If you know of any good examples of these, post a link to your Tutor Group Forum to share with the others in your group.
If you wish to create a series of slides, what do you need to consider in order to produce an effective presentation for your audience, meet your aims and convey the correct message and content? Write your ideas in the following box.
You can use a range of design options in your slides depending on the audience, content and purpose. You may wish to use an organisation logo and style for presentations. Figure 3.1 shows the Open University Business School Powerpoint master slide design, with the University logo and the three logos of international accreditation.
This approach, like a letter heading or brand, allows you to standardise presentations with the professional look and feel of a particular organisation.
Long description
Some organisations use a colour scheme of the brand and a ‘style sheet’ to make sure that all presentations retain the same professional look and feel. You may wish to explore your organisation to find out if there is a standard design handbook which gives you slides, letterheads, email standards, etc., which you must use when communicating with both external and internal stakeholders.
There are a few simple design rules which are easy to follow when creating your own slides. The following sections explore some of these in more detail.
Choosing colour and fonts is crucial in creating a professional presentation. You will explore why in the next activity.
What do you think of the design of this slide? Consider the context, the colours and fonts in particular. How would you improve the slide?
Visuals are often used to make slides appealing and add variety to them. But they need to be selected and used carefully to suit your purpose and need.
What do you think of this slide? How could it be improved?
(Allow 10 minutes)
The point of a presentation is to project a slide with clear information to a larger audience. If there is too much text or if it is too small, the audience will not be able to read it and they may be distracted from the message – it is surprising how little information you can squeeze onto a slide and still read it comfortably.
How much information do you think you need to include on an average slide? Have a look at this next slide.
What do you think of the way in which the information is presented here?
What would you change in this slide to improve it?
Recent versions of some presentation software provide some ready-made graphics, shapes and tables which you can customise. Business presentations will almost always include some evidence in the form of figures and graphs. It is helpful to create spreadsheets with the information in first and then create the visuals which can then be imported into the presentation slides.
Activity 3.5
What do you think of the following slide? Again, how would you improve its impact on the audience?
Have a look at this slide, which shows an example of a flow chart. What kind of information can be usefully presented in a flow chart? Is this example effective?
Now have a look at this slide, which shows an example of a cyclical model represented by a circle. What kind of information can be usefully presented in a cyclical model? Is this example effective?
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