Course: BUSS6171

Effective Period: 2021

Creative Writing for Sustainability

Reporting: How to Frame the Data and
Present Compelling Sories

Session 07
Learning Outcome

• Understand the key concepts of Public Relations and Corporate

Communication
• Develop Framing and Priming
• Understand the key principles of creative writing
Sustainability in Business

A Marketing Perspective

• Since the beginning of this century, a recurrent premise in the

marketing and strategy literature has been that sustainability will have
the same impact as previous megatrends – e.g. total quality, lean
production and digital technologies – on companies’ ways of competing
and creating value
• Along with this, adopting a proactive role with respect to environmental
and social issues is regarded as a key success factor of companies’ long-
term strategies
• Concurrently, however, studies show that only a minority of companies
have followed this suggestion
Sustainability in Business

A Marketing Perspective

• A company’s sustainability DNA derives from a set of shared ideas and

central beliefs about why the company operates as it does, and from the
set of organisational capabilities that have been compiled and related to
company performance over time.
• What may drive companies to implement a corporate strategy in which
sustainability is positioned as a central value?
a view that has its foundation in studies and frameworks suggesting that
sustainability as part of business strategy is related to:
a) the performance of a company’s brands and stakeholder relationships
b) a company’s marketing capabilities
c) a company’s degree of market orientation (MO) as a behavioural and
cultural trait of value creation processes and structures (
Sustainability in Business

A Marketing Perspective

• a sequential development of the sustainability space and degrees of

commitment have third phases with following aspects
a) the company’s top managers (board of directors) make explicit
their dedication to driving CS;
b) the company’s CS strategy is manifested across levels and various
types of activities;
c) the company’s CS strategy embraces not only its own organisation
but also its entire value chain.
Sustainability in Business

A Marketing Perspective

• In the continuous Boston Consulting Group (BCG)/MIT sustainability

studies, the association between top managers’ concern about the
reputation of their company’s corporate brand and their eagerness to
integrate sustainability into their companies’ strategy is evident
• “Leaders of sustainable companies often set aspirational goals and seek
transformational change where the starting and end points are not
necessarily known in full”
• A Marketing Orientation view represents a driver for sustainability by
emphasising the continuous responding opportunely to any overall
additional or new knowledge about key constituencies in the value
chain that might have a bearing on the ability to meet the expectations
of a company’s customers.
Writing a report

Preparation and Planning

• Report writing can be described as a career skill.

• Not only is it a task that forms part of an increasing number of business
jobs, but also it can make a huge difference to how you are perceived
and even how well you get on in your career.
• Today, good communication skills and the ability to write effective
reports are essential competencies for every successful business
person.
Writing a report

Preparation and Planning

• Before you write a single word you must:

– Set your objective.
– Assess your readership.
– Decide what information you will need.
– Prepare your skeletal framework.
– Test and revise your skeletal framework.
Writing a report

Preparation and Planning – Set Objective

• Some possible overall objectives for a report writer:

– to inform
– to describe
– to explain
– to instruct
– to evaluate (and recommend) to provoke debate
– to persuade.
Writing a report

Preparation and Planning – Assessing Your Readership

• Try to find out something about them. The following questions will
prove useful:
– Are the readers alike or mixed?
– Are they used to reading and understanding reports?
– How much time will they spend on this report?
– What do they already know?
– What else will they need to know?
Writing a report

Preparation and Planning – Deciding What Information You will Need

• a general list of areas you will need to cover:

– What happened?
– What were the consequences?
– Was the employee properly trained?
– Was the machine properly maintained?
– Was it avoidable?
Writing a report

Preparation and Planning – Preparing Your Skeletal Framework

• A well-planned skeletal framework is the key to effective report writing.

• There are three stages involved in the preparation of a skeletal frame-
work:
– Write a working title.
– Consider the overall structure of the report.
– Consider how information will be presented within the main body.
Writing a report

Collection and Handling Information

• Locate sources of relevant information

• Obtain the information
• Sort and group your findings
• Evaluate your findings
• Prioritise your findings
• Check your findings
Writing a report

Collection and Handling Information – Locates Sources of Informtion

• There are four sources of information available to you:

– People
– Books and other publications Information technology
– Events and places.
Writing a report

Collection and Handling Information – Obtaining Infomation

• Information can be gathered by one or more of these methods:

– experimentation
– reading
– listening
– observation
– Interview
– Letter
– telephone call questionnaire
– research on the Internet.
Writing a report

Collection and Handling Information – Sorting and Grouping finding

• If the report has been well-planned, this process will be quite straight-
forward.
• Use the headings and sub-headings of your skeletal framework and
make sure you have gathered enough relevant information to complete
each section and subsection.
• If you need more information, gather it now - not once you have started
to draft your report.
Writing a report

Collection and Handling Information – Evaluating finding

• There are two aspects to this evaluation:

– How reliable are the findings?
Accuracy, objectivity, completeness, and strength

– How significant are the findings?

How material are they?
Writing a report

Collection and Handling Information – Prioritising finding

• What you must do is highlight your most significant findings, and be

prepared to explain carefully why they are so important.
• As you prioritise your findings, continually remind yourself that your
aim will be to tell your readers everything they need to know, but not to
waste their time with trivia
Writing a report

Collection and Handling Information – Checking finding

• Before you conclude your investigation or project, you must be sure

that:
– You have collected and handled all the information you will need to
write the report.
– You are satisfied that all this information is accurate and reliable.
Writing a report

Writing and Revising Report

• The order of writing and reviewing is important, and should be as

follows:
– Pre-write.
– Draft the main body and appendixes.
– Review the main body and appendixes.
– Draft the conclusions, recommendations, introduction and
summary.
– Check and amend the report.
– Issue the report.
Writing a report

Writing and Revising Report - Prewrite

• Targeting. Remember your readers. It is all too easy to write for yourself
and not for them.
• Outlining. Remember your purpose and objective(s). Make sure your
outline (general plan) is just wide enough to encompass them - no more
and no less.
• Structuring. Refer to your skeletal framework. Is it still the most
suitable, or will it need to be revised, perhaps to highlight some
particularly important finding?
• Developing. What will you recommend to overcome problems
identified?
• Checking. Are you sure that these recommendations are practi-
cable?
Writing a report

Writing and Revising Report - Drafting

• These components should be written first. Begin with the section or

sub- section of the main body, or with the appendix you feel most
confident about.
• There are two important reasons for doing this:
– For any writer there is little worse than the horror of facing that first
blank page. By choosing to write what you find the easiest or most
inviting, you avoid this initial trepidation by immediately getting
down to writing.
– The more difficult parts of a project seem less forbidding once the
easier ones have been accomplished.
Writing a report

Writing and Revising Report - Reviewing

• Assess what you have actually written and how it comes across, rather
than still thinking about what you had intended to write and get across.
• Put yourself in your readers' shoes and be highly self-critical.
Writing a report
Writing and Revising Report – Drafting Conclusion, Recommendations,
introduction and summary

• Most writers draft these sections in the order in which they appear above,
namely:
– conclusions
– recommendations
– introduction
– summary.
• Conclusions, recommendations and introduction
– Your conclusions must follow logically from your detailed findings.
– Your recommendations must follow logically from your conclusions.
– Your introduction should include everything your readers need to
know before they read the rest of the report.
Writing a report
Writing and Revising Report – Drafting Conclusion, Recommendations,
introduction and summary

• Summary
– Make sure that the overall opinion is expressed accu- rately and unambiguously,
and reflects the findings and comments given in the main body and appendixes
– As already stated, the summary should stimulate the readers' interest by
outlining:
• The salient facts.
• The main conclusions and recommendations.
– Remember that it is intended to serve two overall functions:
• To provide a precis of what the recipient is going to read, or has just read.
• To provide an outline of the report if the recipient is not going to read any
more of the report.
– A summary must be interesting; if a reader finds it boring, the report will have
failed.
Writing a report

Writing and Revising Report – Checking Report

• It is usual for three people to be involved in checking and amending this

first draft:
– Yourself
– a colleague
– your line manager.
References

Others:
• Karin Tollin, Lars Bech Christensen and Ricky Wilke, “Sustainability in
business from a marketing perspective”, in Journal of Strategic
Marketing, Vol. 23, No. 6, 471–496.
• John Bowden, “A Style Guide to Good Report Writing” (p.70-82) in
Writing A Report, 2004.
Thank You