Communications

Communications
Description
For this assignment, you will view and respond to a video case study on the company Ben & Jerry’s. After viewing the video you will write a business letter to address a complaint from a customer. Completing this letter will further expand your understanding of the purpose and usage of a business letter, including the elements of an effective letter, characteristics of negative messages, and the most appropriate way to deliver bad news in a letter.
Imagine that you have been hired at Ben & Jerry’s to help answer inquiries. Although you are fairly new, your boss gives you a letter from an unhappy customer. This customer opened a pint container of Ben & Jerry’s “World’s Best Vanilla” and then threw it out. He saw the brown inner lid and inner sides of the package, and he decided that his pint container must have been used for chocolate before it was used for vanilla. “Or,” he said, “the entire pint has gone bad and somehow turned the insides brown.” Whatever the reason, he wasn’t taking any chances. Although he is a longtime customer, he now wants his money back. The last comment in his letter was, “I like your stand on environmental and social issues, but I don’t like getting my ice cream in used containers.”

Instructions
1. Click the link to watch a case study on social responsibility and communication in business.

Delivering Bad News

Click the link to read a transcript of this media asset

Delivering Bad News Transcript
In 1978 Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield went into business together with an initial investment of $12,000, a $5 correspondence course in ice cream making, and an old fashioned rock salt ice cream maker. In Burlington, Vermont they converted an abandoned gas station into the first Ben & Jerry’s ice cream shop and started making Vermont’s finest ice cream. As business prospered, the owners faced a difficult decision that would have a permanent impact on the company’s future.

Ben and Jerry seriously considered selling the business when it started to grow because they thought they had no choice but to run it the way everybody else runs their business and they had absolutely no interest in doing that. And Ben frequently tells the story about being at that point and visiting this wonderful older man who ran a diner and sitting with them and sort of wringing his hands, I got to sell the business; I don’t want to be a businessman. And this gentleman said to him, Well, Ben if you don’t want to run your business the way everyone else does, don’t; run it the different way.

Ben and Jerry’s operates in a dynamic environment where external factors are difficult for management to control. Historically, Ben and Jerry’s primary customers have been the baby boomers. However, it is now faced with changing tastes and demographics in its target markets.
You do need to diversify your product base which in our case we have come out with the lower fat ice cream products, the lower fat frozen yogurt products, and sorbet products as well. But, how do you appeal to that upcoming new customer base; generation X, Y and Z? So you really need to continue to invest in research and development of your product for new demographics and new market places.
Satisfying legal disclosures concerning its products content has had a positive impact on Ben and Jerry’s sales. We anticipated that once we put all the nutritional information on the packaging, we thought that that might lead to a stronger trend towards the lower fat products. Interestingly enough, high fat products have made a comeback.
Ben and Jerry’s products must compete against both super premium and premium brands. What you have nationally in the super premium area is Haagen Dazs and Ben and Jerry’s. You basically have two major players.
Changes in general economic conditions have not significantly affected Ben and Jerry’s sales. We think one of the fortunate things about the products that we produce is that they’re inflation proof and recession proof. Super premium products are the affordable luxury. It’s the luxury that you can participate in when you’re a little bit down on your luck, down on your money, feeling kind of low, you might be out of a job, but you can afford to buy yourself a pint. I’m going to treat myself. I’m going to indulge myself.
In its industry, Ben and Jerry’s is considered to be a leader in innovation and technology, and the company recognizes the need to use technology to promote its products. There is an engagement and an interaction at the web level, on the Internet level that [inaudible]. So, we now have a website, we’re now using that technology to inform our customers and also to engage our customers and to create that same interaction.
Ben and Jerry’s has made a major commitment to be an active participant in influencing social change. Ben and Jerry’s image as a socially responsible company is closely associated with its product offerings. We think that the social mission does translate to the consumers. In some cases it might be a real top of the mound consciousness, in other cases it might be something that’s a little more subtle. It’s definitely a unique selling point or a point of difference between our product and other super premium products.
People say its part of the brand imagery, but for us its part of the brand reality. It’s who the company actually is. So if you look at market research it would tell us that it’s an affirming reason for buying the ice cream, it’s not the primary driving reason for buying the ice cream because the quality has to be there. Ben and Jerry’s commitment to the environment is an important element of its social mission. We really have an obligation to be environmentally conscious and understand the impacts of what we do. We have to understand what we take, what we make, and what we waste. In the early 1990s, we identified five areas; dairy waste or what we call product waste, solid waste, energy use, water use, transportation. And that has basically been our focus as far as how we are looking at natural resources that are being impacted from making our ice cream.
Examples of this commitment to the environment are the improvements being made to Ben and Jerry’s ice cream container. From a technical term it’s called a solid bleached sulfate board with polyethylene coating, a very common piece of packaging in the packaging industry. Polyethylene coating is petroleum based, it’s not biodegradable. The paper board is a bleached board and there’s [inaudible] on it. The lid that I don’t have here, there are adhesives that are on that. All those contain products that we don’t really want on our package. We’ve been working for quite some time in producing a package that has unbleached paper in that process of creating the package. It’s been difficult and challenging because we are a frozen food, a wet food product. What our first kind of success has been is getting an alternative paper board and that’s what we’ll see here. This is from our vanilla pint with the new graphics that looks like our typical pint right now, but when you open it up you’ll see that it’s brown inside. This is an unbleached board. What makes this particular container white on the outside is a clay coat. And the clay coat does not contain any chlorine bleach in it. So it gives that clear, crisp printing surface of the white board which the marketing department wanted to give the nice contrast to the fine artwork that we’re using for our new pint container, but what I wanted to make sure is that we were not going to be giving up the capability to have chlorine out of the paper board.
Ben and Jerry’s has been very successful in the dynamic marketing environment that is influenced by many external factors. The company has also shown that it is possible to prosper economically while maintaining a strong commitment to social responsibility.
If Ben and Jerry’s will stand for anything over time historically in American business and beyond is that we have made the case for a dual bottom line. Again, as our founders say, We did good by doing good. And I think that’s the very fundamental point of what this company has stood for.
2. Write an adjustment letter that explains the brown interior of the carton, justifies the use of the new packaging materials, retains the customer’s business, and promotes future business with him. Address your letter to Mr. Adam W. Johnson, 1234 West Rocky Road, Phoenix, AZ 12345.
3. Describe the process you used, and what best practices you applied in writing the letter.
4. Save and submit your work to your instructor.