COM 295 Week 4 Practice: Case Analysis: Evaluating the Needs of an Audience

Establishing Credibility as a Presenter

One of your first presentation strategies should be to establish credibility. Without appearing self-serving, find ways to increase your perceived credibility. Use the presentation to show your thorough understanding of a business issue. Frame your ideas in ways that show clear benefits to your company, its employees, and its stakeholders. In every way, display honesty and openness.

During the presentation, you establish your competence by showing that you know the content well. You show your caring by connecting emotionally with audience members and adapting to their needs. You show your character by being open and honest. After your presentation, following up as appropriate with audience members shows your caring and character as well. Some audience members may raise issues for you to look into or ask for additional information. Comply with these requests promptly and you will establish a reputation for responsiveness.

In this exercise, you will evaluate how your actions and statements build your credibility in terms of competence, caring, and character.

Read the case below and answer the questions that follow.

You are a marketing specialist at a media company. Over the past few years, you have been researching how TV viewers use mobile phones and other devices while watching TV. You have found that viewers increasingly expect to engage via mobile devices with TV shows and their audiences while watching TV.

About one month ago, you and your colleagues gave a presentation to executives at your company regarding some of your survey results. The executive team members were generally impressed with the information, but they also seemed skeptical that your company needed to make any major changes. These executives made various statements referring to using mobile devices while watching TV as “largely a fad” or simply “nonmonetizing.” They also expressed concern about making major changes to cater to the youngest viewers (under 25 years old), who they feel are not their most important demographic. However, they were impressed with your presentation enough that they wanted you to dig deeper into the data and come up with some recommendations.

After a month of deeper analysis of your data, you have found even stronger evidence that viewers under 40 use their mobile devices frequently while watching TV. You thought these data helped bolster your argument that younger TV viewers expect an interactive experience while watching TV programs—using mobile devices to interact with TV hosts, actors, and other viewers; to participate in contests and games; and to interact in other creative ways with the programming.

With more and more TV viewers recording shows and watching commercial-free later, you thought that adopting an interactive approach to many programs could counteract this trend and get viewers excited about watching programs live. In fact, you think there is currently a great opportunity to develop a new business model that embraces interactive programming.

Now, you’ve returned to make a presentation to this same group of senior vice presidents (SVPs): Katie O’Harrah, SVP of marketing; Jake Ecksberg, SVP of programming; Sam Clawson, SVP of interactive; Marco Feinstein, SVP of communications; and Peter Orwell, SVP of business development. You know most of these executives are skeptical of major changes to the current business model, but you also expect them to listen objectively to your views. You will recommend that the company aggressively pursues programming with an interactive component. In particular, you will suggest pilot-testing interactive features for three shows that are most popular with your 31- to 40-year-old demographic.

1

Which of the following statements is most likely to raise your credibility through competence?

Multiple Choice

“We’ve provided the original data from the survey on the corporate intranet so you can access it yourselves.”

“I do think we should let our creative teams worry about that.”

“In addition to these survey results, we’ve found from many sources—in our viewer labs, with focus group research, and with interviews of dozens of industry experts—that viewers expect more interactive TV.”

“We’ve done all of this research to help us gain a competitive advantage—to gain insights about where the market is going so that we can focus our efforts in the right direction.”

2

Which of the following statements is most likely to raise your credibility through caring?

Multiple Choice

“I do think we should let our creative teams worry about that.”

“We’ve done all of this research to help us gain a competitive advantage—to gain insights about where the market is going so that we can focus our efforts in the right direction.”

“In addition to these survey results, we’ve found from many sources—in our viewer labs, with focus group research, and with interviews of dozens of industry experts—that viewers expect more interactive TV.”

“We’ve provided the original data from the survey on the corporate intranet so you can access it yourselves.”

3

Which of the following statements is most likely to raise your credibility through character?

Multiple Choice

“In addition to these survey results, we’ve found from many sources—in our viewer labs, with focus group research, and with interviews of dozens of industry experts—that viewers expect more interactive TV.”

“I do think we should let our creative teams worry about that.”

“We’ve provided the original data from the survey on the corporate intranet so you can access it yourselves.”

“We’ve done all of this research to help us gain a competitive advantage—to gain insights about where the market is going so that we can focus our efforts in the right direction.”

4

By showing a thorough understanding of your survey results, organizing your content in a clear manner, and generally showing you are prepared for this presentation, you are most demonstrating what aspect of credibility?

Multiple Choice

caring

character

competence

5

Each of the SVPs has many questions for you. You give each time to pose the questions, and you take time to answer each question carefully. In each case, you acknowledge the importance of the question. In most cases, you provide a thorough, compelling response. In a few cases, you promise to find a good answer for them within a week. What two aspects of credibility are you most demonstrating?

Multiple Choice

competence and character

competence and caring

caring and character

6

Before introducing the results of your survey, you explain in detail how you collected the data and the possible limitations of this survey. You also tell the SVPs where they can access all of the raw data on the corporate intranet. What aspect of credibility are you most demonstrating?

Multiple Choice

character

competence

caring

7

After the presentation, you discover that you provided some inaccurate figures. In a few cases, you inadvertently overstated by more than 50 percent the use of mobile devices while watching TV. You immediately email the SVPs with the correct figures and explain what you think this implies about your recommendations. What aspect of credibility are you most demonstrating?

Multiple Choice

character

competence

caring