Photo From http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/mg/f/f8/Apple_chrome.png

Choosing a culture for your business is one of the most difficult decisions you have to make. In an article by Martin Zwilling I found on Forbes there was a description of 10 directions that an entrepreneur should use to create a good culture in his/ her business. Zwilling took these 10 directions from a book by Jim Stengel and some of the directions included setting your standards high, thinking like a winner, and training all the time. The reason why Zwilling brought up Apple in his article was because of their successful business and culture that goes along with the name “Apple”.

One of the 10 directions that specifically interest me was the one that was more specific to Apple and the legacy that Steve Jobs left on the company. It is important to leave a legacy and especially a good one. Everyone wants to be know for something so why not build a business to create your legacy? To create this, you need to have a goal and everyone in your business, including yourself, need to be working towards this goal. Steve Jobs was very successful at this and it is one of the reasons why Apple is such a successful company.

For more information on the 10 Ways to Build a Business Culture Like Apple visit the Forbes website.

Photo from: http://www.bigkahuna.ca/pages/links

Today I helped with a photo-shoot for Stormtech. If you dont already know, Stormtech is a performance apparel store that sells everything from sports uniforms to daily clothing. Today they had a photo-shoot for their catalogue on my sailboat and it was a great learning experience and made me think a lot about marketing and business. The effort that was put into the photo-shoot, that took approximately three hours, showed how much work is put into marketing portions of the company. It is not just simply taking a photo and putting it into an advertising campaign, it takes time to get the perfect shot with the angles, lighting, backdrop, and pose all having to be perfect. The photographers also needed to make sure that the clothing and logos on the clothing were perfectly positioned so that the pictures accurately portrayed the brand.

I thought that the photo-shoot was well thought out since Stormtech is trying to become a competitor in the sailing market. Advertising people using their clothing on a sailboat or at a marina is a great idea to get sailors interested in their brand.

I enjoyed watching the photo-shoot and getting to meet the photographers and models and I thank Stormtech for the opportunity.

Reading through some business blogs made by fellow UBC students I found one called “Fun Times With Business” by Antoine Chopin. His blog “Coursera: another example of social entrepreneurship” caught my interesting because it examined a social entreprise that did not have to do with “helping the poor nor is it about supporting African agriculture” (A, Chopin, 2012). Most people think that to be a social entrepreneur one must be helping people who are struggling, but this is not true. A social entrepreneur tries to solve a community problem which Coursera does by providing free online university courses. The problem that this company solves is that there are many people who would like to get an education but do not have the financial funds to support them and therefore they provide education for free!

This company is a true social entreprise because it is a mission driven (giving people who wouldn’t normally have the chance, a higher level of education) organization developing a social product (free university level courses).

Social entreprises are a very important part of our society because, without them, a lot of social problems wouldn’t be solved. They are different from Charities because they are self sustained and do not require donations and therefore can have the possibility of being more successful.

Photo curtsey of “Trusted Reviews”

Looking through the Blog posts done by fellow Comm101 students I found Hans’ Blog and his post “Which one is better? Samsung Galaxy S3 vs Apple IPhone 5“. This post was of interest to me because I thought it related to class 5 when we talked about positioning & Value propositions. In Hans’ post he described the competition between the IPhone and the Samsung Galaxy and how their marketing strategies are different. In Comm101 class 5, we learned how companies who came into markets that already had a market leader could advertise and still be competitive by associating themselves with the leading company. By saying “the next big thing is already here” as a play on words of apple’s calling the IPhone “the next big thing” was a very strategic marketing plan. As talked about in class, when a company comes into a market after another company has already established itself in the market the new company should not try to take over the market, it should focus on their points of difference. Samsung does this well by advertising their S Beam feature which shares “pictures, music, videos, and more” by the touch of two phones together. Samsung S Beam Commercial.

Which phone do you think is better?

Looking through the blog posts made by people in my Comm101 class I came across Gaby Hebert‘s blog. Her blog post called “These Boots Were Made for Profit” caught my attention and I felt like it could relate to our class on Supply Chain Management when we talked about the company Zara. In Gaby’s blog post she described the shoe store, Aldo, and how well they were doing as a Canadian company in the world market. I decided to relate this post to our class on Zara because of the inventory turnover ratio. Zara has a very quick turnover rate of about one week from design until the product is in stores. Aldo, on the other hand has a turnover rate of four times per year and a very long selection process. This long process can be good because it means that bad products do not get put into stores, but it can also cause some problems. These problems could arise because trends change quickly and if the company only changes their product every three months, they do not have a quick reaction time to changes in trends. It is great that Aldo is internationally known, but it could be better if they had a faster turnover.