Assignment
The Walt Disney Company Corporate website.
The purpose of this assignment is to help you learn audience awareness by identifying and analyzing corporate identity and values, as well as understanding the difference between a "claim" and "evidence." A claim is what the company says they do. Evidence would be specifics about HOW they do it.
Your assignment is to do the following, using ONLY the corporate website.
1. Identify the corporation's value system. What textual evidence can you find within the corporate website that makes you believe this is their value system? Do they specifically state these are their values? How specific are they? Do they define what these values mean to them? Again, show evidence from the corporate website.
2. Identify what you believe to be their organizational structure (vertical or horizontal). What textual evidence does the corporate website provide to support your beliefs?
3. Identify what you believe is the image that corporation wishes to present to the public. What within the corporate website makes you believe this?
4. Now analyze the presentation of that image. Does the company provide evidence to support the claims they make about their values? For example, if they claim to value input from their employees, what evidence do they provide within their corporate website that they actually carry this out. Saying something doesn't make it true or not true. Do they explain what their values mean to them? Do they detail how they put these values into practice? Do they make this information easy to find within the website? You are looking for any conflicts between the image the company wants to present and the image you actually get from their website.
Ease of reading and clarity of information is important. Convince me that you can effectively tell the difference between what a company claims and what information they present to back up that claim.