Throughout the marketing assignment, my top takeaways are teamwork, time management and marketing knowledge to access companies.

On the very first day of the team meeting in class, it was very helpful to develop a team charter. It allows the team members to collaborate ways to contribute the most in tasks allocation in utilization of their strengths. As a result, I learn to recognize my team members’ talents and to make good use of it. In addition, in order to build a strong team, you need to show your full support to their ideas and encourage more communication channels. My team has made good use of social media and online resources to stay connected and informed with the most recent updates when we are researching on the company’s background.

In order to fully understand marketing, both theories and application are important. I learn more about marketing by applying all the knowledge and skills in analyzing a company. It is extremely useful to apply the strategies and matrices we learn in class to put things in perspectives. If I were to do this project again, I would involve in the video editing part more because we have put too much workload on one person in editing and revising the video. It was more efficient to divide work evenly among all the team members.

As the final season is here, I would like to share some articles with everyone in order to relieve some stress!

Eating: First of all, I understand you want every minute, every second to be spent on studying. As a result, you want to grab a few McDonald’s burgers or pizza in the SUB. Although all of you are aware how unhealthy these food is, here is a video on how to control your daily intake of calories (with moderately active female, daily calories suggestion is 2000-2200, for male is 2600-2800).

In addition, here is a funny article on how nutritionist at McDonald’s claim their food is healthy, and in comparison a food test done on the four-year-ago cheeseburgers.

Finally, some stress-relieve advice! 1. Good music  2. Exercise 3. Smile at least 20 times a day 4. Have a light-hearted mind! 5. Keep Calm and Ace the Final!

For more stress reliving advice, please check out this blog: Stress and GPS for the soul.

Happy Easter! (and happy studying :P)

This blog post is responding to Nadia‘s earlier post about Pinterest.

She has shared her thoughts on the idea behind Pinterest,

“I find it refreshing to log onto Pinterest and simply see images…no brand names or logos.”

She also commented that Pinterest has a small niche market right now and it’s hard for corporate companies to make good use of it. I do agree there are advantages and disadvantages in targeting users and creating a more hobbies-oriented and pining photos of interests that you like.

However, I have recently met Kevin Lepsoe, the CEO of Notey, which is a new Vancouver-based social media that is similar to Pinterest, but more oriented to people, places and topics that matter to you. In addition, it simplifies the user interface and redesigns the webpage to make the graphics stand out from the text. I like the design much better really.

Honestly, graphics and photo sharing is a big trend right now. And of course facebook won’t be missing out. They have recently launched a graph search option for users to find anyone with the same interest in the same area. I think that is a little creepy how our information is being put up out there for people to find me. Meeting new people was not my first purpose when I signed up for a facebook account but I have to say the developer made good use of data mining there. If you are interest to know more, you can check out the official video that facebook put up and a technical review. 

Today we talked about the product life cycle in class and our instructor Tamar has commented her thoughts on the smartphone industry, which is in a growth sector because of the creation of new technologies.

I can’t help agreeing with her because since Apple launched Iphone and the whole millennium generations become obsessed with smart technologies. In particular, this blog post is going to reflect on an article on Marketing Daily: SmartTV Growth is set to explode.

Television has a high adaption to new technologies. For example, 3D technologies was patented back in 1900s but it has become very popular in theaters since Avatar. A new product line, 3D television was made to satisfy the market demand in allowing customers to enjoy watching 3D movies at home. And now with the rapid growing smartphone  industry, television is made to be smarter as a complement of utilization with smartphone. This is a smart idea in strengthening product differentiation with the easy synchronization between electronics.

In addition to using smart electronics as a remote, there are also features such as smart interaction – voice, gesture and facial recognition. I personally think this feature has diminished my satisfaction because it cannot recognize my command most of the time.  But the software has an advantage in sharing files easily within a network and focusing intensively on social networking with compatible apps, which aids consumer in collecting information and making a purchase.

Reference: a user review of Smart TV

It is interesting to investigate types of water in the market, and I would like to share the two most interesting brands of water bottle that I encountered recently.

1. Happy Water

HappyWater is a blend of spring water from Canadian Rocky Mountains and Lithia water through neurogenesis. In other words, it contains 0.1 parts per million of lithium (lithia salts). They brand themselves to bring people happiness because of the minerals the water contains.

As mentioned in the picture, HappyWater not only provides hydration to human’s body, it also provides lots of minerals that are beneficial to healthy living style. In the mature product life cycle in the water bottle industry, it is refreshing to see a new product oriented itself to a new direction.The color yellow especially makes it stand out from other brands because it is a warm color and most of the brands use blue or green in representation of the clean water.

But will HappyWater really make you happier? This Vancouver start-up was also featured and discussed on Vancouver Sun, and as a result of the research conducted in UBC, the effect does not seem to be incremental with the amount of water you consume on a daily basis. However, it creates a behavioral effect on consumers, who might think (or visualize) they are happier after the hydration!

2. Black Water

This is another brand that caught my interest because of the color of the water. A few months ago,  I ran into a promoter from BlackBeverages who came to Save On Food on campus and conducted sampling for the drink. Black water does not sound appealing  to the taste as my first impression, however I decided to give it a shot after he was selling all the benefits that the black water has to me. I would comment on the taste is more alkaline possibly due to all the minerals it contains, but otherwise it tastes like water. This product line is mainly focus on the benefits of bottle water, unlike what it used to be which is to provide clean and distill water. This is a new trend that will possibly drive the product life cycle back into a growth period and generate the new value orientation for customers in consumption of bottled water.

This is an old story: bottled water is not good.
Not for human beings as they might contain cancer-causing chemical in the purification process, and in addition, the plastic will harm the environment as they are hardly biodegradable.

However, Coca-Cola launched a marketing campaign in 2010 in redesigning the bottle and named it as the “Plant Bottle”, 100%-recyclable plastic packaging made up of up to 30% plant-based materials. [1] It is not surprising that more and more companies focus on repositioning their products to have the environmental-friendly feature, and therefore the greenwashing phenomenon is occurring more frequently in the marketplace.

Greenwashing is defined as disinformation disseminated by an organization so as to present an environmentally responsible public image by Oxford Dictionary.[2] And it is interesting in looking at the phrasing of ‘up to 30% plant-based materials’ in the bottle composition because Coca-Cola described it in a vague way.

Plastic water bottles can take 1,000 years to biodegrade. Nine out of 10 water bottles end up
as garbage or litter, and that means 30 million per day.

-Message in a Bottle

The bottled water industry has boomed in the last few decades and it is surprisingly associated with healthy living. People, especially Americans, do not trust the tap water and thus they prefer filtered and processed water in a plastic bottle. [3]

This is an interesting video to end this post:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XglitMx_eBw

[1] Coke’s Dasani Promoting New ‘Green’ Bottle. Marketing Daily. Apr 8, 2010.

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/125758/cokes-dasani-promoting-new-green-bottle.html#ixzz2LztcL7sX

[2] Greenwash definition. Oxford Dictionary.

http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/greenwash

[3] Message in a Bottle. Brian C. Howard

http://www.isisboston.com/assets/PDF-Files/Message-in-a-Bottle.pdf

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