Class - As the latest meeting of the management team of your mobile phone company begins, the marketing team passes out the results of the latest customer survey they performed. There isn’t much in the survey that is surprising, but the one thing that did stand out is that customers want some more information. They want data about the phones’ reception - how well the phones pick up the signal, how well they hang on to the signal, how often they drop calls, or whether they are susceptible to certain kinds of problems. As the marketing team explains, one of the reasons the customers want to know this is because of the iPhone 4, many customers of which noted that the phone dropped calls and lost signals when it was held a certain way. When consumers and journalists criticized Apple for producing a phone with a defect, CEO Steve Jobs claimed that the iPhone’s reception problems were caused by people holding the phone the wrong way and that most other phones from other manufacturers had similar problems. This claim was quickly rebuffed by executives from other mobile phone manufacturers. Jim Balsille and Mike Lazaridis of RIM, Sanjay Jha of Motorola, and Hui-Meng Cheng of HTC all claimed that their equipment performed much better than Apple’s iPhone. The problem was, however, that no one ever provided any data. All customers received were some vague claims that their phones worked great, but no one ever gave them any solid data, research results, or statistics. As your marketing team shows, customers want this data. They’re spending a lot of money to buy phones, and they want to know that it’s money well spent. It’s not as if obtaining or providing this data presents any difficulties. Already, cell phone carriers regularly provide equipment manufactures with dropped-call rates and information about how well specific phones perform on their networks. It’s just that no company makes this data public. So the question facing your management team is how to respond to your customers’ desire for more information. Do you take a radical step, doing what no other company in the industry does, and release information about phone performance to the public? Or do you just follow in the footsteps of everyone else and issue a vague assurance?
Questions 1. What are the advantages and disadvantages of releasing information about the signal reliability of your phones to the public? 2. How could you use this information to gain a competitive advantage over other manufacturers who do not publicize? Please write a 500-to-700 paper in APA Style answering all questions, and include at least 3 reputable sources.