A recent BMO survey suggests small business owners in Canada are more confident about the future than they were last year. (Liam Richards/Canadian Press)

This is a survey interviews 301 canadians this year. The result shows that there are almost 62 per cent people believe the business will be better in 2014 ,while  only 16 per cent people think the business will be worse.

As the article says,  we get that this can be a good news for the economy. People give more confidence to the bank so that they can invest more to their business. Such behaviour  can promote  a good effect to the whole marketing.

Although there are still some people do not trust the bank, it can not effect the big marketing. At least they fell positive about the future ,even though the future may not be really good.

Brands like Harley Davidson built strong communities long before social media even existed.  (Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife)

This article tells us the way to build an effective social marketing strategy.

At the beginning of the article, it tells us one of the most important strategies is to building awareness to customers in 20^th century. But nowadays it can benefit competitors somewhat . So the marketing promotion function has changed.

There are 4 main steps companies have to do.

• Clarifying the mission
• Identifying Analogues
• Focusing on structure
• Create a community (not an audience)

Apple considers to attract customers by using their concept of  the  smart  phones. They clarifying their mission as design.  The apple products have unique looking and system compared to other brands. Personally I strongly agree that the company should identify the barriers like the competitors. The team should figure out how to win the market share among the large number of competitors, such as Sumsang , HTC ,blackberry and so on. As for the apple community, they are huge and professional. One of the reasons why can Apple be one of the most successful brands in the world, the internal structure of company contributes a lot.

So we can see the importance of the brand positioning and value propositions in this article.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/gregsatell/2013/10/06/how-to-build-an-effective-social-marketing-strategy/#faa8f7

This article is talking about the BlackBerry failed to win the smartphone wars.  The company has struggled to compete against Apple and Samsung the smartphone market.

BlackBerry  smartphones are faced mainly to business customers.  They are kind of lack of understanding of markets and they didn’t analysis the marketing really well. So BlackBerry has less market share than Apple and Samsung nowadays.

They do transition to survive BlackBerry, but it is failed.

BlackBerry has finally taken the wraps of its BlackBerry 10 enabled smartphones Z10 and Q10. Z10 is a 4.2 inch touch-screen phone, and Q10 has a qwerty keyboard. BlackBerry is betting that Z10 and Q10 will help the company capture a market dominated by Samsung and Apple.  But blackberry’s market share also not tend to be good.

Personally I think that the blackberry should change their transition way. Although they launched new product, they didn’t think about the marketing. They still face to European countries as they did before but not tend to explore the new marketing. As a Chinese I have to say that a large number of  Chinese prefer blackberry to apple . If the blackberry Q10 and Z10 launched in china earlier than the iphone5s and 5c ,  I bet that most people would choose to buy blackberry but not iphone. Then the blackberry would have  a  big marketing than before and high profit. Then the company can use the revenue to develop some new  domains.

Finally ,the most important reason why they failed the marketing is their lack of understanding of the market. The market is driven by customers’ personal phone preferences, and the team should know better about the customers’ mentality.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/does-blackberry-have-a-future-1.1862945