Marketing Blogs

Have you ever tried being smart and naming the parent company of the grocery that you get in Saveway or SaveOn? Minute Maid is CoCa Cola. Tide is P&G…. brah brah brah. You are quite smart to know about these two. Therefore, I challenge you to read this marketing blog and do the questions on this blog.

http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/adweeks-brand-paternity-test-who-owns-what-148031

So…how did you do? For myself, I think I have done poorly, I don’t even know V8 or Subway is owned who (not saying I know the answers for the rest of the questions). I find this really surprising. Brands, like V8 and Subway, are already huge in the market, and then they are owned by even larger corporations. At this moment, I’m wondering the money that I spent everyday might be be given to only 3 to 4 people on this planet. That is sad. Anyways, so I have tried to search a picture that tells us how the companies that we have transaction with everyday are actually owned by what companies.

This gets even more shocking as I look through other business areas. This actually concerns me. It is not about how owns most of the company but it is about the business ethics that I learnt from the beginning of the class. What happens if all these major companies join together to be business unethical, ripping us off in different ways that we wouldn’t even notice or no way to fight back. If one day, all the construction companies join together and cut the consumption construction material just to increase their profit margin. Can the government even stop them? I don’t think so, if the construction companies all get suspended, the GDP of that country would drop sharply. In that case, can we do anything? Not going to buy the houses? So where are we going to live? This is getting even more scarier if you think of it in other business areas, for example, food and beverage.

 

 

My team is awesome! I have never been in a group that is so efficient. It seems like we have been in teams for a couple of times already. In every meeting, we only have to around 30 minutes on average to assign work and talk about details about the assignment. Although we did pretty bad on assignment 1, but with such a group of great members, we had picked up the pace. We finally got a 90 on assignment 2. The best part of this team is that everyone is good at different things. All team members contribute different values into every assignment.

Also, for some reason, we do not have any arguments in any of our meeting. Usually people said arguments in teams are constructive and healthy, yet, I do not see our team has anything wrong without the conflict part. Whenever someone propose an idea, it will be accepted by the others. It is not because the others don’t care, but the idea just fits everyone’s mindset. I have been through different projects with different size, race or even age of people. This is the best group ever!

As you can see on the picture, ignoring there are only 4 people (all 5 are important in my team), there are members reaching to success with his or her effort while someone at the end of the chain provides more support for the rest of the team. This picture perfectly describes how my team works, and hopefully, we will all reach success together by completing assignment 3 with extraordinary quality.

If anyone of my team members is reading this, I just want to say thank you and you have been a great help in my academic career. I hope you have a wonderful future with your great ability to work in team!

Please watch this! Try not to get goose-bumps!

P&G has been famous of its varies brands, from cleaning agents to personal care products, and they have not failed for a single bit, at least P&G products have not failed my mother. She has chosen a lot of my personal care products that are under P&G when I was a child. Her reason of choosing more P&G products was that one product had helped her and surprised her, thus she went for other kinds of P&G products as well.

Why did P&G made this advertisement? Just to cheer up the mothers? sure, it definitely drains our emotions about our mother, what about in commercial sense? We can see mothers in this video keep on doing laundry, or standing near lines of clean clothes, and have successful children. It gives us a sense that successful mothers use P&G, and every single mother on earth would definitely like to be successful too, thus they will buy P&G products. Except encouraging mother to purchase P&G products, this video also tells its audience that mother care about children personal hygiene and care products, and P&G can fulfill all these needs and provide enough support to kids to become future stars!

I personally really enjoy watching this video, and I also failed to avoid goose-bumps. It is so touching that I watched it for 5 to 6 times. I have never watched a commercial for so many times, not even the first advertisement for my favorite movie. From now and onwards, I will just my products from P&G, because it reminds me of my successful mother, and this touching video!

This blog post is referring to Kevin Zhuang’s blog post about the impact of Weibo, the Chinese social media giant. In Kevin’s post, he said that Weibo was a great tool to increase Chinese government transparency for people in China, who are not allowed or being observed by the government most of the time through different spyware, such as the famous Green Dam.

Chinese government has been notorious of its controlling of its people voices.  It was surprising how they allowed Weibo to be established in China, so did RenRen, which is another Chinese version of Facebook. So why did they allow social media to be Chinese daily lives? Did they want people to have their freedom to talk bad about the government? Did they want China to be an “open” China? If they do want to give citizens some new standards of freedom, why just not allow Facebook to enter the market? This is the reason, from Facebook’s China Problem, “Facebook’s most immediate hurdle in China is a communist government that limits free speech and allows officials access to company data. In return for a license to operate, Chinese companies are required to employ censors at their own expense.”

Aha, it is clear then! Weibo and RenRen are still under control of the Chinese government control! All transparency or hope that Kevin mentioned is just a flash of light! In my point of view, Chinese government is using these tools to check on its citizens and censor them, block them, arrest them! China has not changed. The incident mentioned by Kevin is just a rare one, maybe the news was too viral or ridiculous for China to hide. In a conspiracy side of thinking, Chinese government is using these tools to spread the ideology of the government. Recently, there is a trend in China, and it’s about hating Japanese. The Chinese government might just spread it online in order to get the people to be angry, and thus China has an opportunity to have war with Japan, and seize her resources.

In the James Bond movie, “Die Another Day” in 2002, there’s one really cool gadget used by James Bond to destroy the entire enemy base, the invisible car. It was so cool that everyone dreamed to own one of those bad boys.

However, so many years after, the dreams aren’t fulfilled in anyways. Honestly, I was disappointed until I saw this advertisement on youtube. Please watch this youtube video before continuing reading this blog. LINK.

Pretty cool, huh?? Yay, transparent cars actually exist. Oh, nevermind, it was just an advertisement for their new line of cars by Mercedes Benz, “F-CELL”, featuring the use of hydrogen cell, which is the legendary alternative energy source for cars. So why did they have this transparent cars advertisement? How is the advertisement related to their products? Transparent cars… first thing comes to my mind would of course be excitement, which makes me to look up this company, and especially for this transparent car. While I’m doing that, “F-CELL” keeps appearing in every blog post, websites, or anything that talks about this transparent car, and yet, “F-CELL” is what this advertisement all about. I guess the advertisement works pretty well, at least now, I know quite a lot about this “F-CELL” unintentionally when I am only trying to do more research about this transparent car.

Second thing comes to my mind, hydrogen cell, it’s a standard answer for my high school science projects. “How to save the earth? Hydrogen cell”, “How to be cost effective? Hydrogen cell”. Unfortunately, not many know what a hydrogen cell is, and what are its advantages. I think this advertisement actually does a really good job about conveying the advantages of hydrogen cell to its potential customers, or even the general public. The car is transparent, which means it does not exist, in other words, the car doesn’t produce any noise, pollution, smell, thus it would be so environmental friendly that its existent would not affect this world as if it dosen’t exist. And yet, no pollution and low noise and no smell are the key benefits of adopting hydrogen cells as the main energy source to function a car.

Even though the transparent car in this advertisement is just a rare one, the advertisement did a really good job to attract peoples’ attention towards a new line of Mercedez Benz cars, and yet it’s secretly convey the goodness of the feature of this car, hydrogen cell. This is a really successful advertisement in my point of view.

Source:

Advertisement video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=To0sSJKqeEk

“Die Another Day” photo: http://vadakkus.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/aston_martin_inviz.jpg

Mercedes Benz advertisement photo: http://i.imgur.com/5wEsa.jpg

 

 

 

 

” McDonald’s which is a major franchise restaurant worldwide has lured millions of children into eating at their restaurant, by supplying a free venue for birthday parties and an outdoor area with a children’s playground. This can create an image of “if you want a happy time, go to McDonalds”. They also have their name on some of the educational products such as stationery and programs on computers used in primary schools. This encourages young children to want to eat McDonald’s which is a very unhealthy fast food, and as it is a part of the schooling environment, children think that this has the approval of the education department. This could lead to poor food choices in later life.

 

Today many soft drink companies such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi try to cover up the fact that their soft drink is extremely unhealthy, by creating new no sugar soft drinks to promote the fact that there is no sugar in their drinks.  So instead of putting sugar into their drinks they use artificial sweeteners to make it have that same taste as the original drink. This makes the advertisement of these new “no sugar soft drinks” misleading and therefore unethical. It really confuses the issue that artificial sweeteners are also related to health problems. ”

 

The above 2 companies obviously violates the ethics in a way that they choose to ignore the health of their consumers. However, on the other side of their marketing campaign is all about sports, charity, or anything that gives general companies a positive image. Why would they even do that? Are they begging for forgiveness? I do not think so. If they want forgiveness, why would these companies continue to market their products years and years? 2012 is not the first year that their products are complained to be unhealthy. What happen if they do stop advertising, stop all the marketing campaigns? I guess people would still go for Mcdonalds when they are hungry, or drink Coke when they are thirsty or craving some sweetness. These events would definitely happen, so why are people concerned with the ethics of Mcdonald’s and Coke’s marketing strategies? People are still going to have consume them even without their advertisements! In other words, consumers are the ones who choose what they want even the marketing strategies are unethical. Thus, I am confused about the importants of ethics in marketing. It seems not as important as the ethics in other industry. I guess I am wrong, hopefully, I have a clear mind about it after the lesson about ethics

Source:

“Ethical & Unethical Marketing”

Image Source:

“McDonald’s Birthday Party”