When I opened Wechat, which is a social platforms supporting group chat, voice, photo, video and text messages, I could see that many of my friends frequently updated their moments about how NuSkin has changed their beauties and  how NuSkin has been better off their lives. They lauded the products to the skies and tried to brainwash their friends and families for buying NuSkin’s products. After seeing those moments several days, I just blocked those people without seeing their updated moments anymore. For my perspective, I would think that I have low involvement of this brand because of little interest in the products; therefore, I paid less attention to its products although many of my friends have introduced so many times of those products to me.

I was curious that “Has NuSkin done something for those people?”. Later on, I found that the company has many interesting and critical marketing news. NuSkin, using Multi-level marketing (MLM) models for compensation, has been a frequent subject of criticism and lawsuits. The Multi-level marketing is a marketing technique which involves people buying a product, then earning a commission by selling it to their friends and families. This model is profitable once it operates successfully as the first individual will receive compensation from the sales of the down line members and the company captures most benefits from the MLM binary tree structure. If you open YouTube and search for NuSkin marketing, a great deal of information such as “NuSkin how to make money” will come forth in your screen. I feel like that network marketing is a powerful and modern form that everyone can open their businesses, especially for personal selling, through this way as it is low cost and effective.

Before the official announcement of the iphone 5c, many Apple’s fans expected that Apple would offer iphone 5c at a relative low price to compete with cheap devices running Android. The lower cost smartphone would be priced at around 400 dollars in order to address developing markets such as China. However, everyone got very wrong since the “c” in iPhone 5c did not stand for “cheap” in any way. In reality, the iPhone 5c is completely different, with Apple offering a phone with a 172 dollars BOM and manufacturing cost, and a 549 dollars market price. Previously, Apple’s strategy was to position one new version for the high-end of the market and discount older version for the price-conscious segment. But the company just stopped offering iphone 5(one of the old versions) by offering two new versions which are iphone 5c and iphone 5s to different types of customers. Basically, iphone 5c is really similar to iphone 5 except the different colors of plastic cases. The company chose a new market strategy believing that the appearance of new means something is new, no matter what came before. By lowering its cost, Apple is optimizing its iPhone hardware gross margins to attain maximum profitability.

The target audiences of iphone 5c will be kids or teenagers and the 5s is for higher income people. From customers’ point of views, the price of the iphone 5c was supposed to be cheap but they were shocked by the truth. Those customers who have middle income might feel disappointed after they knew the price of the iphone 5c; instead, they might prefer iphone 5s to iphone 5c. For those higher income people, it would not bother too much for their decisions of buying iphone 5s as they have already valued 5s as their identities.