Cristine Li

Talk To, a new app for convenient communication with any businesses. Small businesses can use this app to communicate with customers by texting, instead of calling by waiting and listening to the voice prompts and music. People can send text massages to those businesses which already signed up for the service to book a table, reserve items, asking questions, etc..

This service incurs engagement between customers and businesses with low costs. Small businesses can use Talk To the promote their services and products, and makes a friendly image for potential customers. Talk To app is a great idea, but it may have limited success. For small businesses, which all seek to maximize their profits and minimize the costs, Talk To will cause increasing cost since the businesses need to hire employees to respond the texts. In addition, text massages sometimes will cause misunderstanding, it is inefficient compared to talk. Especially the customers want to have responds immediately, Talk To is unable to do that. However, large companies can use Talk To as well. As large companies already have established customer service system, including email and phone call services, Talk To can be their additional platform for communications.

Source: Article 1

The author of the article discuss the important of having a uplifting customer service for the companies. A good customer service is necessary but not enough, as the competition is intense in the market these days, sellers should try to improve its customer service from “good” to “uplifting” level. If the sellers do so, then they have great competitive advantages. Sellers can help and solve problems for their customers, as well as learn and improve themselves from the feedbacks.

One of the methods to improve customer service is the sellers should deal really well with customers’ complaints. If not, they will lose potential customers because the complaining person “represents nine other people who didn’t tell you.” Apple is a model of excellent customer service. Employees in Apple store gladly help everyone who asks for help, they make the customers feel good while experiencing the Apple products in the store, instead of just try to sell products.

Having an excellent customer service will cost much but worth. It will improve the companies’ brand effect, and keep their past customers loyalty as well as attract potential customers. Establish a uplifting customer service is now an important method of marketing strategy that companies will need to compete with being different from their rivals.

Source: Article 1

Walmart currently introduced its new mail subscription service named “Goodie”, which is same idea as Birchbox’s model. Customers only need to pay $7 per month, and they will receive a box included selective samples of food products with value of $15 from Walmart monthly. Subscribers will earn membership points if they give review for these goods, which they can redeem the points to get free boxes or products in the future.

Walmart is smart for doing this because they save money by advertising for suppliers and itself. As the VP of Walmart, Ravi Raj, says in the article, Walmart can not only fighting for price war. Not just copying Birchbox’ model, Walmart ttys to differentiate itself by introducing “Goodies” with membership points system. Subscribers will pleasant to give feedback to Walmart and earn points for their future purchasing in Walmart. It is a win-win strategy. As Janice Chan says in her blog post, the feedback will help Walmart to identify its popular products, and thus Walmart can change its inventory and selling.

However, this kind of service is easy to copy, which means its competitors may do the same thing or find a better way to defeat Walmart. Therefore, Walmart need not only to keep improving its existing service, but also finding other ways to support the sales in long term.

Reply for Janice Chan’s blog post: Wal-mart “Goodies” Subscription Service.

Original Source: Article 1

The big discount sale day, “Black Friday”, is coming in two weeks. Same as other big sale days, crazy shoppers will line up in advance in front of the stores or malls for buying much cheaper things quicker than other people.

Most of the shoppers think they will lose money if they do not line up and buy those “cheaper things”, and that is exactly what the sellers want them to think about. And actually the fact is most of the items they buy are not necessary and waste money. Same as we talked in one of the Comm 101 classes, shoppers can save money if they simply do not buy the items they do not need.

As Panos says in his blog post, customers are emotional, or being told to be emotional, while buying discounted items. Sellers use this for their marketing strategies that convinced customers the discounted items are what they need, not just want. Customers should ask themselves if they really need to buy it no matter it is cheap or not, if the answer is no, then keep the money.

Reply for Panos Mourdoukoutas‘s blog post: Are You Really Getting A Bargain Black Friday Deal?

Microsoft currently announced that it will shut down its Windows Live Messenger (MSN) in early 2013 except mainland of China. MSN was the most popular social media in the history of Instant Messaging (IM) market that it owned more than 60% of global IM market. However, the amount of active users of MSN has dropped steadily these years with only 100 million for 2012, which was same as the figure in 2003.

MSN just published three new versions for MSN since 2005, which was complainted that they did not actually have any differences. While Facebook, Twitter enter the IM market, progressive upgrade for the services and products is the strength for the company, but Microsoft did not do it. By following up users’ satisfaction, companies can know how the customers rate their services and products, and thus they can change to meet the requirements. As the buyer power is high in the IM market and technology changes quickly, Microsoft should keep changing its strategy and upgrading its products. Simply ignore users’ satisfaction will eventually lead to fail.  Even Microsoft keeps MSN in mainland of China, if it do not do some change, it will easily lose this last market of MSN because Chinese IM company Tencent is more popular than MSN these years.

Reply for Cecilia Wu’s blog post: When the legend becomes history – Skype to globally replace MSN.

Original Sources: Article 1 , Article 2, Article 3, Article 4

Facebook currently introduced its new service, Job Board, which is a online recruiting service connected to the Facebook users. Employers post jobs on their Facebook pages, and candidates apply jobs directly through it. Even though there is a already a leading company called LinkedIn in online job service market, Facebook still shows its strong confident to share the market.

As social media become more important for marketing strategies in these years, Facebook acts as a good way to share a company’s news and advertise its service and products to customers from all over the world. Now with Job Board, the companies can hire employees through it, too. Huge amount of Facebook users is the biggest competitive advantage of Job Board. Facebook is smart for doing this. “Only 22 percent of users are above the age of 45”, which means most of the Facebook users are young people. Different from LinkedIn, which is more professional in doing online recruiting service, especially for employers seeking for long-term managers with rich experience, Job Board are mostly based on young people who seeking for wages instead of salaries. Sharp focus will help Facebook get a considerable share of online recruiting market.

Reply for External Blog post: The Facebook Job Board Is Here: Recruiting Will Never Look The Same

Canda’s fastest-growing retailer, Dollar Store, is “forcing mainstream merchants”, such as Walmart and Canadian Tire to promote their own dollar-merchandise sales.

Dollar Store succeeds because it is specialist in dollar merchandise business and it can “respond quickly to customer demand with low-cost procurement”. It borden its’ offerings and has created a great brand image to the shoppers that it is the most specialized dollar items seller, Dollar Store use this strength to compete with its’ rivals. Also, Dollar Store does not only target the low-income people, but also the middle class shoppers.

Walmart and Canadian Tire are selling dollar items as well to “recapture shppers”. However, compare to Dollar Store, those people who want to buy dollar items, will not change their favour. It is more like a operational effectiveness than strategy that they are copying what their competitor doing. But one of Walmart and Canadian Tire’s advantages may be that they sell dollar merchandise as well as regular products, so that the consumers come to their store for the $1 item and may purchase the more expensive ones as well. Unfortunately, the competitors’ changing strategies give Dollar Store very little impact that it still have remarkable growth.

Read the aritical here: Aritical 1, Aritical 2.

Apple began a rage selling of their new product iPhone 5 from last Friday.  Apple fans “queued around the city” to got the new iPhone 5. Apple announced that they already sold 5 million in store iPhone 5 during the weekend, but it’s supply can not follow up the demand.

IPhone series may be the most popular and well-known smartphone in the world and it is benefit by Apple’s successful brand positioning. It’s fashional design, friendly and easy use experience, and unique system makes iPhone5 has a increditable increasing sales. By using the SWOT analysis method, it shows that iPhone5 has strong strength and great prospect compare to other smartphones. However, iPhone5 has a weakness that Apple introduces their own map on it instead of Google map. Many users  find out that the Apple map has “a number of geographical errors, missing information, and a lack of features”, this weakness will affect their future customers while they are making choices. Also, Apple cannot ignore the threat from their rivals. Since iPhone5 has huge shortage and some technical problems of Apple map, Apple’s rivals may get the chance to share the market.

(13 of 13. People line up outside of the Apple Store on 5th Avenue for the release of Apple’s iPhone 5 in New York, September 21, 2012.  Credit: REUTERS/Lucas Jackson)

Read the artical here: Artical 1, Aritical 2.

Luxury fashion companies, such as Burberry and Tiffiany & Co., are both having a slowing growth in China. Both of them reported that their profit is less than what they expected. However, their rival, Prada, does not have this problem. According to Prada’s report,  “Sales in China rose 50 per cent to €334-million. Same store sales were up 19 per cent.”

Why there are big difference sales among these luxury fashion companies? I think one of the reasons is the their brand positioning. Not like Burberry, which is focus on the high-end fashional apparel market, Prada is “solidly in the luxury camp.” Prada’s products are more diversiffed than Burberry because they not only sells apparel, but luxury leather goods as well, which takes many Chinese luxury goods fans’ fancy. Maybe this different brand positioning make their profit growth different.

Also, even Prada can not ignore that the whole world’s economic is suffering a recession, expecially in Europe and North American. Even it does not stop the growth of the luxury goods market, it slows down it. The luxury fashion companies, however, count on too much on the sales in the holiday period for their good portion of annual profit.

Click here to read the Artical 1, Aritical 2.

Becoming Green, a private telemarketing company, hired 23 prisoners at low wage. Seventeen of them are being paid at £3 a day, which is only 6% of the minimum wage, to work in the company’s call centre. Meanwhile, 17 former employees were fired with the explanation that it was “part of the normal call centre enviornment”. Most of the fired employees said that they were fired because the company wanted to reduce a great amount of salaries payment by hiring prisoners instead of regular employees.

So is it unethical to hire low-paid prisoners?

There is no appropriate answer for it. For the company, it absolutely prefer hiring prisoners for saving costs and earn more profits. However, for the regular employees, they are non-competitive compare to the prisoners that they done the work at almost  free. For the prisoners, it provides them work experience except the extremely low wage. It seems unethical for both the employees and the prisoners about the wage differences. However, there is no rule that anyone is assigned to a particularly job, so the company has the right to decide who they want to hire. And it is actually having a ecnomic innovation which should be encouraged and congratulated.

Read the whole article here.