Файл: Е.А. Копылова Тексты для внеаудиторного чтения (английский язык).pdf

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CONSUMER RANKINGS

Each American drinks around 230 litres of soft drinks a year. But how do they choose which to buy? Advertising is a key factor in consumer choice. Here’s what consumers thought of the Pepsi and Coke advertising campaign in the early to mid-80s.

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On a scale of 1(high) to 10(low)

As you can see, Coca-Cola fought back strongly after the problems of the New Coke launch.

Speaking.

XVII. Roger Enrico, Pepsi-Cola’s chief executive officer, said, “After 87 years of going at it eyeball to eyeball, the other guy just blinked.” (i.e. After 87 years of fighting face to face in the cola wars, the opponent just admitted defeat). How can you explain these words?

XVIII. Summarise the text using your own plan and the following key patterns :

1. The article is called ...

2.The title of the article is ...

3.As the title implies the article describes ...

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4. The article is about / on ...

is devoted to ...

is concerned with ...

deals with ...

touches upon the problem of ...

5.In the introductory part of the article the author points out ...

6.It is specially noted ...

7.It is spoken in detail ...

8.Much attention is given to ...

9.It should be stressed (emphasized) that ...

10.The article contains useful information on ...

11.In concluding paragraphs it is pointed out ...

12.The article contains statistics about ...

13.The readers attention is drawn to ...

14. I find the article interesting ( important; easy to understand; hard to

understand).

15.I can’t agree with this point.

16.I don’t think the author is right here.

17. What the author mentions here is worth remembering.

18. I don’t understand the reasons the author gives for...

XIX. Write a description of the cola war’s history based on the text and questions XIII, XIV, XV, XVI.

Reading

What associations do you have for the word “apple”? If you associate it only with a fruit or Adam and Eve from the Bible, then the text to be read will broaden your outlook.

APPLE COMPUTERS

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Silicon valley. Home of the hi-tech dream. Birthplace of the computer age. In the early 1980s this strip of land just south of San Francisco was compared to Florence at the height of the Renaissance. It was alive with new money, new ideas and new technology. The Valley’s young entrepreneurs truly believed that their revolutionary computers would change the world.

But , by 1985, that dream lay in ruins. In a sensational industry shakeout thousands lost their jobs and hundreds of brilliant sunrise companies went to the wall. In this programme, Make or Break tells the story of Apple - a company that made it through that slump - and looks at the role of John Sculley, Apple’s chief executive officer - the man who made the tough decisions that ensured his company survived.

In the early 80s, Apple had been the darling of Silicon Valley. The company was founded in 1977 by young computer enthusiast, Steve Jobs. At first, Jobs and his colleagues worked out of a suburban garage, but in less than 5 years Apple had grown to be one of American’s top 500 companies and by 1983 was the computer industry’s main challenger to IBM, with a turnover of more than $1bn. But success hadn’t really changed Apple that much. It was still far from being a conventional American corporation. Apple was a company of ideas and ideals. Its aim was to shift the focus of computers away from institutions and onto

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individuals. For Apple, the personal computer was “a set of wings for the mind” - a tool which allowed people to develop their ideas and realise their true potential. Here’s Christopher Hird, an expert in business research and investigation, talking about Steve Jobs and Apple’s philosophy.

Hird:

The thing was, Steve Jobs had this great vision. I mean he did believe that there should be a computer in every home. Now at the time, of course, that was really a revolutionary idea. So it wasn’t sufficient that he just had a good product, what he also needed to do was he needed to have a way of selling that product and that idea to people.

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To achieve this aim, in 1983 Steve Jobs hired John Sculley as Apple’s chief executive officer. A lot of people considered him to be a strange choice. Sculley’s brilliant career at Pepsi-Cola had made him famous as one of America’s top marketing men, but in many ways he was the antithesis of everything that Apple stood for. Apple was a company of the Californian counter-culture. The average age of its employees was 27. Its executives dressed in T-shirts and jeans. Loud rock music played in its labs and offices. Sculley, on the other hand , typified the grey suits and conservative ways of East Coast corporate America . They made an odd couple, but John Sculley and Steve Jobs worked together to plan Apple’s growth strategy. Apple adopted the consumer marketing techniques that Sculley had employed so skilfully during his time with Pepsi. The number of Apple’s distribution outlets was increased dramatically, while the company’s advertising budget was raised from $15m to $100m.

John Sculley, it seemed, had arrived at just the right time. 1983 was an unprecedented boom year for the home computer business. Here, John Flatman, merchandise controller of the British retailer Boots, describes the market situation at the end of that year.

Flatman:

It’s been a quite extraordinary Christmas selling season for computers, they’ve been about the hottest line we have. We could certainly have sold many more of certain lines of computers if we’d been able to get hold of sufficient stock.

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In 1984, Sculley and Jobs planned to go one better. Early that year, using some of the most innovative advertising ever seen, the new Apple Macintosh computer was launched. The BBC’s Barry Norman sent this report on its progress from the 1984 West Coast Computer Fair in San Francisco.

Norman:

Meanwhile, back to the Fair itself and to Apple’s Macintosh which completely dominates the whole exhibition. Apple are plugging their new little portable very hard indeed, even giving away a complete Macintosh system every day as the main prize in a series of competitions, and a 12 ft model of the machine towers over the main hall. By comparison with the attention given to the Macintosh stand, poor old IBM next door looks practically ostracized.

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The Macintosh looked set to be a runaway success. It sold 50,000 units in a mere 74 days and Apple’s revenues to the year ending in September jumped by a staggering 54%. Sculley and Jobs confidently forecast a turnover of $1bn for the peak Christmas quarter and decided to build up Apple’s inventory enormously to cope with the expected demand.

It never came. That Christmas, the home computer boom came to an abrupt end. The market was saturated. Apple’s revenues fell 30% short of the $1bn target. Their stockrooms piled high with unsold computers, the company was plunged into crisis. All over Silicon Valley, firms were going bust. If Apple were to avoid the same fate, John Sculley would have to act quickly and decisively. In particular, he would have to confront a number of problems that Apple’s huge growth in the 83/84 period had concealed. Unfortunately, Apples biggest problem was Sculley’s friend and partner, Steve Jobs. Jobs was chairman, founder and figurehead of Apple, but he was also the greatest source of conflict and tension within the company. Sculley’s solution was simple: he fired him.

Next, in a drive to cut costs and increase efficiency, Sculley restructured the management hierarchy along functional lines and closed 3 out of the company’s 6 factories. 20% of Apple’s workforce lost their jobs and hundreds of workers were left in tears on the company campus.

Finally, Sculley looked closely at Apple’s profitability. Because of its enormous advertising budget, the company had neglected its gross margin

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- its total profits on total revenues. Here, Christopher Hird explains the implications of this.

Hird:

In the computer business to keep ahead you’ve got to keep investing in research and development. Now the gross margin that Apple was making was big enough to pay for this massive advertising campaign and the investment in research and development. So, they just weren’t profitable enough.

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It was obvious to Sculley that the company needed a radically different marketing strategy. He decided to re-position Apple and to target the business market. This would enable the company to reduce advertising and distribution costs and together with higher prices, could significantly improve the company’s gross margin. But for Apple a transition like this was not going to be easy, as Christopher Hird explains.

Hird:

So what they had to do was find a way of re-positioning Apple in the business computer market. But, of course, the thing was this didn’t fit in very well with Apple’s own traditions. They were ... a fiercely independent company, they didn’t like the idea that they would have to sort of pay attention to what the rest of the world was doing - after all, they’d really made their name by saying there’s something different about computers - it’s not just for business people, it’s for something that goes into the home. But it became absolutely clear that if they were going to survive they had to make a business computer, which was, of course, a big market and a growing market and if you make a business computer, it’s got to be compatible with the people who dominate the industry - IBM.

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Apple had to change their approach in other ways, too. Business users were different from home computer enthusiasts. They weren’t going to be impressed by mere technology. They wanted computers that would work for them, save them money, solve their problems. So, Apple’s strategy was not so much to sell computers as to sell solutions to problems. The most famous example of this was the Apple Mac desktop publishing