What is this phenomenon that seems to have taken over and making people rodeo dance?  It is none but the famous 34-yeal-old rapper Park Jae-sang from South Korea that has the whole world dancing to his new beats, Gangnam Style. Just last week PSY held a free concert for 80’000 fans in Seoul, bringing the whole city to a stop, what is truly impressive about the concert was that the municipal authorities gave PSY the permission to perform outside the city hall where traffic was blocked.

What interested me was why the municipal authorities would allow such a thing? And so willingly? Well it so happens that Gangnam Style has been South Korea’s biggest music import, just on YouTube alone it has reached 400 million views, also reaching #2 on music charts both in the U.S and U.K. With this the government saw an opportunity to change how the world saw South Korea, Lee Myung-bak, the president of south Korea, has been highlighting the importance of “establishing a national brand”, lucky for the president there is a an important wave working for Korea as it becomes the lead in pop music.  This popularity all over the world is creating a softer and higher quality image of Korea; this helps many industries such as cosmetics, TV production and even foreign exchange. This phenomenon helps define the importance of marketing and how it can affect the economy on a grand scale.

Mundy, Simon. “What Gangnam Style is doing to brand South Korea.” Globe and Mail. N.p., 8 Oct. 2012. Web. 8 Oct. 2012.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/international-business/asian-pacific-business/what-gangnam-style-is-doing-to-brand-south-korea/article4596798/

This is a splendid post! I really liked it because you thought outside the box and instead of applying the Maslow Hierarchy of Needs for its usual marketing purposes you applied it to employees motivation. This is a great deal important because it wouldn’t matter how much products a company would be able to sell unless it was able to produce all those products and to do it in the most efficient way possible. For a company to maximize its profit it needs not only to increase the numbers of product sold but it also needs to decrease the cost of producing. This can be attained through employees because it is they, all together, that make up the company and it is their innovative ideas that will produce a more efficient confirm. To motivate employees to do beyond their job it is important to give them more then just the feeling of safety. In my opinion the company needs to make their environment feel more like a community where people can learn to work together and come up with better ideas then they would alone. As the company works up Maslow Hierarchy of needs they will see that their workers will become much more motivated to work and the results will be outstanding.

Everyday our brains are overwhelmed with information, to work with this we learn to organize this acquired information in categories and each category most often then not has an image or example to help us quickly associate and/or compare other things to it.

This is a key ingredient that companies must understand before marketing their products because a company has a greater chance to prevail if the category in which they plan to sell has nobody else in it, meaning no competition.

A good example of this is Apple’s IPhone, this smartphone seems to have revolutionized the cell phone market creating new and most fascinating way of contacting people, the company saw a need and it accomplished great things to fulfill this need. Thanks to its start Apple’s “brand has become associated with revolutionary innovations”¹ but this reputation will only live on for so long unless the Apple company keeps producing products that are truly ahead of the rest.  While reading an article in the economist “Five out of ten: The iPhone 5 is hardly a great leap forward” echoes the disappointment in many apple users, especially with other companies like Samsung that has a more advanced product like their Samsung Galaxy. This doesn’t necessarily means that the consumers are ready to change products yet because Apple is still viewed #1 in its category and people will be very reluctant to switch products because in our minds we placed apple as the most advanced and innovative product, it will take an immense leap forward from Samsung to overtake Apples reputation and this take down will also take a very long time.

¹“Five out of ten.” The Economist. N.p., 15 Sept. 2012. Web. 8 Oct. 2012. Path: http://www.economist.com/node/21562939.