Recommendation on an International Market Venture at Cowboy Chicken

Topic

Recommendation on an International Market Venture at Cowboy Chicken

Instructions

Your workplace manager has asked you to work collaboratively with two employees in order to produce a brief (three-page maximum) recommendation report that summarizes research about working in an international context and then concludes with several recommendations. Your immediate audience will be the supervisors and managers at the workplace, and they are interested in finding ways to work more effectively with international consumers and clients or the workforce or management of an international company or organization. Your readers should be able to apply your research immediately to their workplace. For example, your recommendation report may be able to help managers think through the consequences of merging their managerial philosophy with that of another company from another country and culture.

As a writing group, make sure to have a good grasp of a particular workplace, so that you and your colleagues can make specific recommendations based upon the type of workplace or industry you are writing for. After your first decide upon a company or organization, make sure to conduct some research (e.g., find a mission statement of the company on the Internet). If your group decides to make up a company, then find out something useful about the particular industry that the company belongs to.

As your team begins working, you’ll want to have a firm grasp of the scenario:

  • What is your company (and what is the industry of this company)?
  • What country will you choose for your international focus?
  • What is going on? What has prompted your supervisors to write this recommendation report? In what way is your company or organization changing? What questions will your supervisor readers have? (Does it have an interest in focusing upon new consumers or clients from another country? Is it going to be opening up a satellite office in a different country? Is a team of employees from an international sub-contractor coming to visit? Is your company purchasing an expensive service or technology from an international company?)
  • Based upon your scenario, in what ways can you narrow the scope of your recommendation report? (You don’t want to write a broad, social-studies-type report about a country: for example, “Here’s everything you need to know about working in China.”) Here are some possible keywords to narrow your focus:
    • Business etiquette
    • Consumer behavior
    • Workplace culture
    • Managerial styles
    • Communication
    • Communication technologies or social media
    • Leadership
    • Training (e.g., feedback and discipline)
    • Hiring practices
    • Communicating problems (e.g., “damage control”)
    • Issues of privacy, censorship, plagiarism, etc.
    • Issues of human rights, gender equity, race, etc.

Your recommendation report consists of four sections: a brief introduction, which engages your readers and explains the international focus; the body, which summarizes the current research around major points; a conclusion, which provides the recommendations and suggests how your readers should apply the research; and a references section. Skim Workplace Writing (pp. 24-26) for more background about these sections.

Use a memo format (Workplace Writing, pp. 16-17) as well as APA citation style to alert your readers what ideas, examples, and specific language are coming from your research sources and what ideas, examples, and language are your own. Your references section should include at least six sources.

Ideally, each group member will find several strong research sources that will then be synthesized and become part of the report. Your research does not need to come from formal, academic sources; you can conduct research by interviewing (or emailing) industry workers, using company blogs or class notes, company blogs or trade journals, or accessing newspaper articles (on Google or Lexis/Nexis) and textbooks. Your research sources should be current, accurate, and practical; you should be able to transform these research sources into action for your readers.

Here is a brief breakdown of the types of questions that you should be able to answer in each section:

Introduction

  • Who has asked you to complete this recommendation report? When?
  • What is your purpose? What should your readers expect to see?
  • What is the overall scenario? What is the change that has occurred and that has prompted this report?
  • What is the particular focus that your research is going to take?
  • How will you be organizing your results?
  • What can you forecast about your overall recommendation for your audience?

Results / Body Section

  • What are the main points that you will be covering? How are these points going to be organized?
  • What do outside research sources say that is interesting about the international context?
  • What specific examples do you have of other companies or organizations working through a similar context?
  • What do the sources agree on? Disagree about?

Conclusion / Recommendations

  • How can you make the researched results relevant to your workplace and your readers’ concerns and questions?
  • What are your most important recommendations? Less important?

Answer preview

Following the request you made requiring my team to develop an international focus report in helping Cowboy Chicken venture in a new international market of Saudi Arabia, we hereby present market analysis and, thereafter, present recommendation on what the company should do. As Cowboy Chicken is renowned for its high-quality casual dining restaurant services, serving of all natural, hormone free wood-fire rotisserie chicken, signature tomatillo enchiladas, and plenty of home-style sides, expanding into an international market is important because it will enable the company create a broader revenue source for its highly reputable cuisine. In this case, several characteristics about Saudi Arabian market need to be well understood in order to ensure that the company’s new venture succeeds. The most critical market characteristics that you need to understand and integrate them with the business strategy in entering and developing a business unit in Saudi Arabia include communication problems, consumer behavior, and workplace culture.

Word count: 1071