There is no denying that we are  trying to get a better understanding of the world by all means though out lifetime. The whole process can be defined as learning or being educated. From my point of view, learning is not only about reading and schooling, but also communicating and cooperate with others.

COMM299 is all about communications based on business fundamentals.It provides me great opportunities to find out my strength and weakness when I negotiating with others or promoting myself to others.

During the procedure of learning 299, such as writing cover letter and resume, the first thing I noticed about myself is I ought to do more intern and have more social practices.

There is no denying that we are  trying to get a better understanding of the world by all means though out lifetime. The whole process can be defined as learning or being educated. From my point of view, learning is not only about reading and schooling, but also communicating and cooperate with others.

Recall my past 20 years, I benefited a lot from a variety of people and situations. The greatest lesson I have ever learnt is building relationship with people is the best investment.

As finals coming soon, this term is about to finish.

I can still remember what the professor said in the first class: marketing is everywhere, and it is in our everyday lives. I think I have got sense of what she said,

To be a good marketer, an very important thing to learn is observing and thinking. Doing what I am supposed is not enough. I should also learn from others. Direct experience and indirect experience, combination of them will make a great difference. Therefore, I’d like to share the top 50 marketing blogs here. Enjoy! Hope everyone can aquire some information.

http://www.evancarmichael.com/Tools/Top-50-Marketing-Blogs-To-Watch-In-2009.htm#social

The Top 50 Marketing Blogs To Watch In 2009

After the success of last year’s list we are ready to release the list of the Top 50 Marketing Blogs to watch in 2009. We searched all around the Internet looking for the best marketing blogs in a number of different categories. We’ve sorted them into nine different areas and if you’re looking at building your marketing presence in 2009, these are the must read blogs for you to check out. Enjoy!

The Marketing Genius Scavenger Hunt, brought to you by Happy Worker… find all the orange letters below on the page, put them in order and get a prize that is guaranteed make you a happy worker . Thanks to Happy Worker for the fun marketing blogger illustrations. Happy Worker invents and manufactures custom toys and original promotional products.

Small Business Marketing Blogs

Affiliate Marketing Blogs

Online Marketing Blogs

General Marketing Blogs

Search Marketing Blogs

Marketing and Technology Blogs

Marketing and Advertising Blogs

Social Media Marketing Blogs

Brand Marketing Blogs

All of these clips are tightly related to our course. I learnt some thing from them. Hope you enjoy them~~~

When we was learning STP, stands for segmentation targeting and positionning, we mentioned a segment base named product-related. One of the varibles in this segment base is customer loyalty.

Are they not loyal, somewhat loyal or completely loyal?

To what extent a firm’s customers are loyal determines the firm’s marketing strantegy. Loyal customers are people who consider a certain firm as their best choose. They believe this firm will provide the maximum outcome for them and meet their need best. Therefore, this group of customers are the most meaningful and profitable customers. Focusing on long-tern development and relationships, offering them more benefit and set up concret loyalty makes sense.

The Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.(wikipedia). To my understanding, as a pre-marketer, pareto principle says 20% customers make 80% profit.

In terms of Pareto Principle, investing on loyalty program is never too much. It determines how far a firm can go.

Check the Youtube video clip out for a more accurate and detailed description.

There is no denying that advertising is an important means of promotional campaign. It conveys information of products and services, and re-educates consumers. A good advertisement creat brand awareness, constitute brands’ images. It is not only selling a product or service, but also selling a concept, a culture and a lifestyle.

Super cute TV commercial! It captured the cuttest features of dogs and made a strong impression.  I believe people are willing to pay more for Pedigree after seeing this CM.

Cultural(literal) appropration. Using the features of Karl and creat a difference image. The interaction between the weired creature and Kimura Takuya(the hot guy in this CM) draws audiances’(potential consumers) attention.

Giving the chocalate bar some connotivation by telling a story. When people are buying it, the memory of this story and the warm feeling will be evoked. Hence, people who was moved by the CM would purchase the chocalate bar.

Fits Chanel’s level and its positioning.

In terms of the economic theory, the wireless service market is close to oligopoly, Several big firm share the market and compete with each other to achieve profit maximization. Each of them owns their unique selling point and competitive advantagement. The market structure is stable and hard to change to some extent. Therefore, to win in long-term persipective, they have to contribute a lot of effort to make a “perfect” marketing mix strategy. Consumer loyalty seems extremely essential in this case. According to PLC theory, the Tele-communication service provided by Rogers, Fido or some other firms has been in maturity, and the market structure has been remained the same for a long time. That illustrate an important fact that they may have been reached the optimal solution. To boom their profit by innovation, management or simple promotion might not make a big difference. One determinant in the long-run competition must be: customer loyalty.  As we all know( every marketer), consumer loyalty stands for the extent of how loyal a firm’s customers are. It is a essent to decide a firm’s sustainability. The further a firm want to go, the more important consumer loyalty is. Every competitor is managing to seize more customers and make them life-long customers. Because firms are focusing on the future, they values the relationships more than simply monetory profit. They are willing to sacrifice some profit in short-run to win a concret relationship with their customers.This situation is similar to dilemmas. Provide that every firm offers extra benefit to consumers, the optimazed  outcome for the whole market will be achieved when every single firm involved give out bonus features. Thhat’s why Fido is going to give up some profit to seize you.

I read the Chinese version of a econimic book named “The Economic Naturalist in Search of Explanations for Everyday Enigmas”. When it was published in China main land, the title of this book is translated into “牛奶可乐经济学”， which means the ecomony about mike and coca.

Based on Chinese version, the publisher pick up a very interesting question from the book as a special selling point:”Why the container of milk is a rectangular paper box but of coca is a round metal can?” Robert H. Frank, the author of this work, answered it in details.

Generally,  as i remembered, milk is always pilled into cups as breakfast. People purchase a big volumn of milk several times a month and drink them everyday. Therefore, putting milk into a paper box can allow a bigger volumn. However, people usually do not pill coca into a cup, instead, they just hold it by hands and drink it directly. The round shape is much easier to hold than rectangular.

More importantly, milk has to be stored in a ice-box, otherwise, it will be spoiled soon. In contract, coca is not easy to get spoiled and do not require special conditions to store. Because the cost of ice-boxs is high and they maintenance is costly, every inch in the ice-box is precious. Rectangular paper boxs allow a greater quantity and save operating spendings. However, the normal display racks is much cheaper compared to ice-boxs. The space of them is not a determinant. Therefore, the container designed to be round cans.

This is an example of the decision making of distribution strantegy and packaging. Retailer and manufactures are all involved in this case. Hence, we can tell that distribution needs cooperations and interactions between individual business aspect.

Although this book is about economy but not commerce or marketin, I still high recommand it. It provide a method of thinking which is also can be used in commerce.

Get it in Amozon, click http://www.amazon.com/Economic-Naturalist-Explanations-Everyday-Enigmas/dp/046500217X

Know more about it, click http://www.robert-h-frank.com/book.html

How can we get Fido internal VIP plans with extremely low price? There is a way help you to do that and save hundreds dollars.
The first step is dialing 611 (Fido customer service), entering the cell phone number, selecting “change Data or Voice Plan” by pressing 2. After that, a Fido agent will be online and asking what he can do for you. We say: “I want to transfer your Fido service to WIND and I’ve got extra discount from them.” Then the Fido agent will show how good Fido is, how much Fido offers. After ten minutes of these kinds of words, we can say: “It seems you cannot understand my explanation. Do you want to talk with my WIND agent to check out the details?” Trust me, no Fido agent would answer: “Oh, yes. Let me talk with him and ask how can you persuade my customer to be yours!” What Fido agent going to do is asking the details about the WIND plan. We can state that $25/montg with unlimited Canada-wide call and txt msg, plus $150 credit if transfer from Fido, and the agent promised to give $10 credit/month for the first six months. What I’m pretty sure is Fido agent would use cancellation fee to threat us. At that time, just tell them we’ve calculated even though we pay extra dollars for cancellation, we can still save hundreds.
Then the agent goanna leave no efforts to persuade you. Remember, hold on, and don’t be fooled! The victory is just around the corner. Show them our strong will to get discount!
Minutes of negotiation later pretend we realized something and say, “Wait, you cannot do transfers and cancellations, right?” Fido agent will transfer us to Fido customer relation department. Using the speaking skills we learnt in 299 to convince them Fido is not a good choice. Focusing on our real situation and figure out the most costly part of our current plan.
If there is no accidence, Fido would offer several VIP plans at this time which are all less and equal than $30/month with many extra features. The best one I’ve heard is $25/month with 200 minutes day time, unlimited after 5pm, 2500 msgs, call ID and 100M 3G data.
Isn’t it a great deal?
Oh, I forgot to mention! If unfortunately Fido is convinced that we’ll stop contract anyway without any space to negotiate, and they really cancel our plan, what we can do is just paying the cancellation fee and going to WIND to sign for a new plan.
There are several marketing strategies used.

I talked about the UBC positioned as a business but not only a education institution few days ago. What was very interesting was that we got a mid-term written question which has similar ideas as my posts.
I remembered I indicated that UBC’s marketing segment is not only internal but also external. Within the campus, UBC runs a successful business of providing students education, fast-moving consumer goods, and identification of UBC students. Overall, we can tell that UBC campus formed a business cycle with mutual organizing and operating.
For external part, UBC is more like a brand. In every UBC webpage, we can see a tagline defining UBC as “a place of mind”. As we all know, “mind” covers everything in this objective world. From this point of view, I may guess UBC targets the global market. The tagline show UBC’s attitude: Welcome all ideas from the entire world. It is not looking for abundance of individual students, but abundance of creative ideas. Students are limited, but ideas, or we say mind, never have a boundary.
I segmented the external market into two categories. The first one is the market directly related to UBC’s main property- education. For this part, UBC enjoys a sustainable competitive advantage other competitors hard to catch up within a short period. It was students of UBC. The high quality of education and research UBC offered appealed thousands of brilliant students who are considered promising in their life cycles every term. Gradually, people formed an awareness that UBC stands for intelligence and a bright future. These students are walking advertisements to some extent. They are promoting UBC’s image and advocating UBC’s advances.
The second category is products related to UBC. This field owns incredible diversity. Professors of UBC may sell their reputation and their technology to the society. UBC may co-operate with profitable business to do some project. Businesses may buy technical supports from UBC. In a word, UBC has a lot of ways to broaden its business and market. For the reason that a university a combination of all kinds of sciences and knowledge, UBC can always gain competitive advantages in the first time.