Regarding Ron AshKenas’s “Don’t Ask for Feedback Unless You Want It”, I thought it was an interesting take on the psychology behaviour of humans.

Throughout education, we were taught that we should always ask for feedback for any of our work because having others’ opinions will further stimulate our critical thinking. However, this behaviour is not necessarily beneficial. In fact, Ashkenas states that we only ask because we feel obligated to. We may not actually feel the need to ask for feedback if we are already confident about ourselves, but we still ask anyway because we feel socially mandated to.

Personally, I find myself guilty of this behaviour when I ask my friends about decisions that I have already decided. However, I believe it is the reassurance and support that my choice was correct that I go ask for my friends’ advice. If you are absolutely confident what you decided to right for you, asking people for their feedback might instead hinder your outcome as their suggestion may advice you to think differently.

After reading the Arya Radjendra’s blog post about making a sustainable social good, I completely agree and I would like to add on to this idea with a bit of my insight. Many people are now gearing towards creating a business not solely based on generating revenues and profits, but rather, how to create a business that can socially benefit the society.

Making a socially responsible business is of course a good cause, but the challenge for these businesses is how to sustain it in a long term period. The fresh milk seller visited by the Arc Initiative from Sauder shows exactly how this can be done. The owner realized that it is a highly profitable opportunity for a milk business and opened stores within the area to sell fresh milk. This is done by transporting milk from the farms in the rural areas everyday to achieve this. This business could be classified as a social enterprise because

1) The owner created jobs for the drivers to transport the milk each day.
2) The farmers are able to exchange the excess milk supply from the cows for extra money or goods.
3) The citizens that live in the area are able to buy fresh and organic milk that is healthy.

Today, another Sauder BCom alumnus, Tom Dobrzanski, came to speak for a few minutes about his ventures into the music business. Honestly, I’m very impressed and pleased with the amount of guest speakers and professors the class has brought in. Thank you Comm 101!

Anyways, I thought it was very inspiring to listen to Tom talk about his business as he was able to incorporate what he had learned from school and apply to his interest, music. It was particularly fascinating to learn that it was by chance he became involved with his band and the realization that linking his degree to a business in the music industry was possible. Many people come into business school with the hope of finding a job with satisfying pay after graduating; I too fall in this category. However, we fail to realize that working on a job we are passionate about is equally important. I believe in order to find true happiness, it is very important to follow your passion and work on a job that you are actually interested in rather than simply for the sake of a good pay. I am jealous of these people that have found their passion and work as I have not yet found mine, but I am inspired to do the same.

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In a response to Clement Lau’s post on “The Lonely Box”, I have to say that I only see the sales of the greeting card businesses, such as Hallmark, to continue to decline.

The form of communication has changed dramatically with technology improving more rapidly than before. Social networking sites, such as Facebook, have allowed everyone for easier communication. The future for the card industry does not look bright unless they think of new streams or innovative ways to promote and sale their products. The article that Clement used for his reference did mention companies establishing new products like personally customized greeting cards. I believe this is a good way for the companies to go about garnering from their loss of sales. Social media, although convenient, gives off the vibe of being more casual rather than formal. To properly and whole-heartedly deliver a message, a physical copy of a written message is still the best option.

If I want to buy something cheap and small, a dollar store would be the first thing that would come to mind. I think that dollar stores have a strong brand postioning in that consumers remember the dollar store as a place to buy cheap goods.

Nowadays, it appears that more and more consumers, such as people from the middle class and even the upper class are leaning more towards buying products from the dollar stores. The low price of the products and the simplicity of the store format have attracted many customers to choose to shop at a dollar store instead. It has reached a point where stores such as Walmart and the Canadian Tires are viewing dollar stores like Dollarma as external threats to their companies.

However, as a consumer, I would not think of dollar stores as a major threat if I were big companies like Walmart simply because our target market is somewhat different. In terms of brand positioning, a dollar store would come as a place where I buy small items like hair bands. However, for all other items, I would go to Walmart. This is because Walmart is marketed more of a department store where I can get almost anything, but at a lower price. Dollar stores, although cheaper in price, are limited in variety of goods in comparison. Of course, I would not mind the competition among these stores as there would be more discounts coming along the way.

Images: http://www.saskatoonmarketmall.com/mall_directory/stores/specialty/images/dollar_store.jpg

http://edcompassblog.smarttech.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/walmart.jpg

Recently, the world’s most popular social networking website, Facebook, faced a small crisis in which a small proportion of users complained that their old private messages were made public. Facebook quickly denied this claim, stating that the messages listed on the users’ timelines were public to begin with.

So this leads to an argument, either Facebook did make an error and turned all private messages to public, or the users themselves did not believe they would have posted such messaged publicly on their friends’ walls years ago when people were less concerned about privacy.

The reason why Facebook became an enormously popular platform was the fact that they allowed users from all over the world to connect with each other through personal information. That was their point of difference. Facebook made money through advertisements that were tailored to this information.

However, now that more and more people are addressing the importance of privacy, people are less inclined to publish their information online. This in turn causes Facebook to lose a ton of profit, since providing advertisements to the users’ personal information was how they made money.

Although Facebook users are now less inclined to display their information publicly, they still love the network, which allowed many to reconnect with old friends. This was and still is their brand, to connect with friends. So now the question would be, what can Facebook do to gain profit while allowing users to share their information privately?

image: http://www.stolaf.edu/services/hr/facebook_logo.png

The much anticipated Apple iPhone 5 has finally launched on September 21, and over the weekend, it has already sold 5 million phones.

In my opinion, that’s an astonishing number. However, despite selling 5 million phones (already), it was a disappointing number. Many analysts had expected the new phone to sell over 6 million phones over the weekend. This could be attributed to the fact that the latest edition of the iPhone is not considered revolutionary, but rather, just an improvement of the previous one.

For the past few days, I’ve heard people talking about the latest iPhone everywhere I went. For the most part, people were satisfied with the improvements of the new phone, such as the weight of it. However, I had also heard many complaints and disappointments, like how the screen still has the same width. The people with disappointments were probably upset because there wasn’t an extraordinary change compared to its previous version. I agree that the changes to iPhone 5 are not huge, but there is only so much creativity to make a new and unique phone. Apple has already created a significant mark in the phone industry. Everywhere I go, I see people holding a generation of the iPhone (while I’m still carrying a flip phone). That is their brand, and I don’t see them changing anything to it drastically anytime soon.

image: http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/180325s1aobqsjpg/original.jpg

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