Month: March 2013

Have you ever tried being smart and naming the parent company of the grocery that you get in Saveway or SaveOn? Minute Maid is CoCa Cola. Tide is P&G…. brah brah brah. You are quite smart to know about these two. Therefore, I challenge you to read this marketing blog and do the questions on this blog.

http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/adweeks-brand-paternity-test-who-owns-what-148031

So…how did you do? For myself, I think I have done poorly, I don’t even know V8 or Subway is owned who (not saying I know the answers for the rest of the questions). I find this really surprising. Brands, like V8 and Subway, are already huge in the market, and then they are owned by even larger corporations. At this moment, I’m wondering the money that I spent everyday might be be given to only 3 to 4 people on this planet. That is sad. Anyways, so I have tried to search a picture that tells us how the companies that we have transaction with everyday are actually owned by what companies.

This gets even more shocking as I look through other business areas. This actually concerns me. It is not about how owns most of the company but it is about the business ethics that I learnt from the beginning of the class. What happens if all these major companies join together to be business unethical, ripping us off in different ways that we wouldn’t even notice or no way to fight back. If one day, all the construction companies join together and cut the consumption construction material just to increase their profit margin. Can the government even stop them? I don’t think so, if the construction companies all get suspended, the GDP of that country would drop sharply. In that case, can we do anything? Not going to buy the houses? So where are we going to live? This is getting even more scarier if you think of it in other business areas, for example, food and beverage.

My team is awesome! I have never been in a group that is so efficient. It seems like we have been in teams for a couple of times already. In every meeting, we only have to around 30 minutes on average to assign work and talk about details about the assignment. Although we did pretty bad on assignment 1, but with such a group of great members, we had picked up the pace. We finally got a 90 on assignment 2. The best part of this team is that everyone is good at different things. All team members contribute different values into every assignment.

Also, for some reason, we do not have any arguments in any of our meeting. Usually people said arguments in teams are constructive and healthy, yet, I do not see our team has anything wrong without the conflict part. Whenever someone propose an idea, it will be accepted by the others. It is not because the others don’t care, but the idea just fits everyone’s mindset. I have been through different projects with different size, race or even age of people. This is the best group ever!

As you can see on the picture, ignoring there are only 4 people (all 5 are important in my team), there are members reaching to success with his or her effort while someone at the end of the chain provides more support for the rest of the team. This picture perfectly describes how my team works, and hopefully, we will all reach success together by completing assignment 3 with extraordinary quality.

If anyone of my team members is reading this, I just want to say thank you and you have been a great help in my academic career. I hope you have a wonderful future with your great ability to work in team!

Please watch this! Try not to get goose-bumps!

P&G has been famous of its varies brands, from cleaning agents to personal care products, and they have not failed for a single bit, at least P&G products have not failed my mother. She has chosen a lot of my personal care products that are under P&G when I was a child. Her reason of choosing more P&G products was that one product had helped her and surprised her, thus she went for other kinds of P&G products as well.

Why did P&G made this advertisement? Just to cheer up the mothers? sure, it definitely drains our emotions about our mother, what about in commercial sense? We can see mothers in this video keep on doing laundry, or standing near lines of clean clothes, and have successful children. It gives us a sense that successful mothers use P&G, and every single mother on earth would definitely like to be successful too, thus they will buy P&G products. Except encouraging mother to purchase P&G products, this video also tells its audience that mother care about children personal hygiene and care products, and P&G can fulfill all these needs and provide enough support to kids to become future stars!

I personally really enjoy watching this video, and I also failed to avoid goose-bumps. It is so touching that I watched it for 5 to 6 times. I have never watched a commercial for so many times, not even the first advertisement for my favorite movie. From now and onwards, I will just my products from P&G, because it reminds me of my successful mother, and this touching video!

This blog post is referring to Kevin Zhuang’s blog post about the impact of Weibo, the Chinese social media giant. In Kevin’s post, he said that Weibo was a great tool to increase Chinese government transparency for people in China, who are not allowed or being observed by the government most of the time through different spyware, such as the famous Green Dam.

Chinese government has been notorious of its controlling of its people voices.  It was surprising how they allowed Weibo to be established in China, so did RenRen, which is another Chinese version of Facebook. So why did they allow social media to be Chinese daily lives? Did they want people to have their freedom to talk bad about the government? Did they want China to be an “open” China? If they do want to give citizens some new standards of freedom, why just not allow Facebook to enter the market? This is the reason, from Facebook’s China Problem, “Facebook’s most immediate hurdle in China is a communist government that limits free speech and allows officials access to company data. In return for a license to operate, Chinese companies are required to employ censors at their own expense.”

Aha, it is clear then! Weibo and RenRen are still under control of the Chinese government control! All transparency or hope that Kevin mentioned is just a flash of light! In my point of view, Chinese government is using these tools to check on its citizens and censor them, block them, arrest them! China has not changed. The incident mentioned by Kevin is just a rare one, maybe the news was too viral or ridiculous for China to hide. In a conspiracy side of thinking, Chinese government is using these tools to spread the ideology of the government. Recently, there is a trend in China, and it’s about hating Japanese. The Chinese government might just spread it online in order to get the people to be angry, and thus China has an opportunity to have war with Japan, and seize her resources.