During one of our classes last week we focused our views towards marketing. In this class we watched some advertisements from soda company Pepsi. Pepsi, unlike Coca-Cola, needs an advantage so they create ads that are against coca-colay. One ad in particular shows a young boy buying two cokes from a vending machine, merely to stand on them so he can buy a Pepsi.

This has become a similar scene with the two smartphone heavy weights, the Galaxy S3 by Samsung and the iPhone 5 by Apple. Samsung has struck first with their new minute and a half ad that shows people waiting in line for the iPhone 5, while people all around them have an S3 and are using some of there many features available to show that Apple is no longer the only powerhouse.

This ad created by Samsung might be one of the funniest attack ads I have ever seen. But most of all I believe this ad has persuaded me to choose a Samsung over the new iPhone. I have an iPhone 4 right now, but through watching this I would rather be one of the people with a Samsung Galaxy S3 than a slightly upgraded iPhone 5.

The ad by Samsung: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf5-Prx19ZM

In 2008 the world suffered a major economic crash due to poor business practices and unethical decisions. One of the key components of this major market crash was the unethical practice of securities fraud. Securities fraud is “A type of serious white-collar crime in which a person or company, such as a stockbroker, brokerage firm, corporation or investment bank, misrepresents information that investors use to make decisions … The types of misrepresentation involved in this crime include providing false information, withholding key information, offering bad advice, and offering or acting on inside information.” This is what major investment banks like, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs were taking part in. They were selling subprime mortgages to people and betting against them and the collapse of the subprime mortgage bubble in the mid 2000’s. I find this extremely unethical for the fact that they are selling something to someone one minute and next they are betting against the failure of it. The example my teacher always gave was, a car salesman selling a car and cutting the brake lines. Then taking out an insurance policy against it for they know it is going to crash. They were betting against something they knew was going to fail and that is extremely unethical.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/may/20/wall-street-role-financial-crisis