Category Archives: Links from Classmate’s Blogs

In Canada, there are three major telecoms carriers, TELUS, ROGERS and BELL. Of course, there are little carriers, using different names under those major carriers but I am just looking at a bigger picture here. I think the cell phone market in Canada is monopolistically competitve market and they are competing each other to capture more market shares than others. There are high barriers for new carriers to come into market and compete against those three major carriers so customers must choose one of three carriers if they want to use cell phones in Canada.

Then, what are their strategy to capture more customers from their competitors and finally win this market? In Colton’s blog, he is saying that there are three different factors that affect customers’ decisions: the customer service, reception and selection. First, the customer service begins when new customer enter into a carrier store. The atmosphere of store and service of employees highly affect new customer’s decision making. Also, billing service or different kind of plans that carrier is offering also influence customer’s satisfaction. Another important factor that a lot of customers care is the reception of phones. It is essential for carriers to have broad service range to reduce reception ploblem. If your phone always go out of service, you would consider changing your carrier. Last factor is the freedom of selection. Different companies offer different phones and data plans. If there is a new phone released and it is your favorite phone, you would choose that carreir which offers that certain phone. That is why carriers put much effort to make a contract with as many phone manufacturers as possible to provide various phones. 

Currently, those major three carriers in Canada evenly shares the market, so it is interesting to observe what kinds of new strategies they would come up with to eat out other carrier’s shares and success in the market. For marketers, it is crucial to create effective marketing strategies for those carriers not to fall behind the market and hold as many customers as possible for companies’ success.

In Jenny Chan’s blog, I found one interesting post about famous movie actor John Travolta and how he saved Qantas, one of the biggest airlines in the world. Personally, I am a huge fan of him because I like his movies and his lifestyle. Even he is a movie star, he knows how to fly airplanes. I saw his house once on the internet and his place was totally amazing. He owns two jets and runaway at his backyard. Okay, so in Jenny’s post, there is a short video where John says he is a huge fan of Qantas Airline. At the beginning, I didn’t know why he was saying that. However, after awhile, I realized that Qantas Airline actually casted John Travolta to recover their losses from technical problems which happened few weeks ago. The truth is few airplanes from Qantas Airline experienced technical problem right after getting off, so many passengers were suffering from the fear. After those unexpected accidents, Qantas Airline got damaged in their brand image so they came up with the idea of casting John Travolta as a strategical move. By casting John Travolta, who is an expert in airplanes, and letting him say good things about Qantas Airline, Qantas Airline was able to save themselves from Qantas going down situation.

In marketing perspective, Qantas Airline made a right decision to cast John Travolta. Because he is known as an Airplane man, people have no doubt of what he says especially when he talks about airplanes. Strategically, Qantas Airline uses the social image of John Travolta effectively to hold passangers away. Good job Qantas! Travolta saved you!