Question

Scenario: Walter Joss is one of the best employees in your department, a smart and hard worker with a keen mind for business. His upbeat attitude has helped the entire department get through some rough times recently. On a personal level, his wise counsel helped you grow into a leadership role when you were promoted to marketing manager several years ago.

You generally welcome Walter's input on the department's operations, and you have implemented several of his ideas to improve the company's marketing efforts. However, the proposal he emailed you yesterday was not his best work. He proposed that the company dump the advertising agency it has used for a decade and replace it with some new agency you've never heard of. The only reasons he offered were that the agency "had become unresponsive" and that a "smaller agency could meet our needs better." He failed to address any of the other criteria that are used to select advertising agencies, such as costs, creative skills, technical abilities, geographic reach, research capabilities, and media experience.

This is the first you've heard any criticism of the advertising agency, and in fact, their work has helped your company increase sales every year.

Your task: Develop a well written, thorough, and tactful email for the purpose of rejecting Joss's proposal. (In a real-life setting, you may want to discuss this with Walter in person, rather than through an email, but for the purposes of this assignment plan to use email.)

Word count is up to your discretion based on the content and context as outlined in this assignment.

Answer 1

Dear Joss,

With reference to your proposal of replacing our current advertising agency with a new one, I would like to discuss with you the points why I do not find it a feasible action to take for the better of the company. Firstly, our current agency has been serving us from a decade with a flawless service. Their effective participation in serving us with their facilities has helped us increase our sales enormously in the past years. I do not see any defective point of theirs which would make me take a step to finish out business terms with them. Your reason that they have become unresponsive is a point to be considered but this issue can be solved by discussions with them and compalining them about the same. If they still continue with it may be then we can have a strong reason to give this proposal a thought.

Secondly, the new company you have proposed is a new name not very much heard in the market. We are unsure about the quality of services they will provide us. And changing to an unknown agency with no big reasons and not much knowledge about them can be a risk to the company's turnover. The reason you gave was that smaller agency can serve us better but at the same time I feel smaller agencies may have lesser resources to meet our demand of promt results. They may lack experience and as they are a small agency they may not bother much about their reputation with good work in the market. These are reasons that could we should think before taking the risk of the change in agency at this level.

I do not doubt your decision power and has always appreciated your capabilities and the service you have given to the company to face many odd times successfully. But in this proposal I would like you to come up with some more valid and strong points for us to take this step like costs, technical abilities, geographic reach, media experience and such strong factors that the new agency posses and any more weak factors of our current agency for us to dump them for the new one.

I would really appreciate your positive approach to this matter and please come up with any more factors you would like me to give a thought to for changing my decision.

Thanks and Regards.