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