It is shocked that 95% of the new business fail is because they segment their market and position their merchandise wrong.  And this is why milkshake marketing profoundly intrigued me, its extraordinary way of thinking.

Taking milkshake as an example is just far beyond brilliant.  Who would ever thought that people hire milkshake is not for consuming hunger or thirst but boredom?  “Looking at the market from the function of a product really originates from your competitors or your own employees deciding what you need whereas the jobs-to-be-done point of view causes you to crawl into the skin of your customer.”

“We developed this idea because we wanted to understand what causes us to buy a product, not what’s correlated with it”, as Clay Christensen claimed, milkshake marketing(aka jobs-to-be-done) turns out to be a very effective way in allowing a company to build products that people want to buy.

This is a blog post comments on Danny Brown’s blog regarding context marketing( the ability to look into the context of what your customers want and deliver on that need).

Danny Brown mentioned that context in marketing is nothing new when it comes to marketing.  He used email drip campaign as an example, which illustrates that context marketing has been happening for years long before it started to gain tractions in the online space.  The essence of context marketing is pretty self-explanatory, which is understand your customer.

From personal perspective, it sounds to me that online marketing is growing.  As it reminds me of an old campaign states that “If you haven’t seen it, it’s new to you”.  context appears to be new to online market, and the society think they’ve discovered a new universal truth.  And the challenge for online marketing is to make it contextual.

BBC  News revealed that social media pioneer Twitter has said it will open an office in Hong Kong in the first quarter of 2015.

Twitter wanted to step into Asian market by expanding their business in China, starting from Hong Kong.  The company told BBC that their upcoming office in Hong Kong will enable them to “pursue strategic opportunities in Greater China, such as China export advertising market, Hong Kong and Taiwan advertising markets, media partnerships, and new Twitter Fabric integrated with MoPub for mobile developers”.

Even with Twitter’s extreme optimistic predicted feedback of the opening of Hong Kong office, I personally beg to differ.  With the messaging service being banned from operating in mainland China, the opening of the new office won’t allow Twitter to go into mainland market, which it does not make a difference from before.

This blog post is regarding Kristine Wong’s blog on people’s post of extravagant and luxurious photo depicting their wealth on social media.

It is mentioned that the Canadian Revenue Agency is taking advantages of these post to verify the consistency of their income and their tax return.  “If caught under-reporting income, they might subject to tax penalties or even prosecution.”

From personal perspective, I disagree with what the government has been doing since  it is a violation of privacy from the authorities to take advantage of social media for verifying tax returns.  People’s posts on social media are private, only to share with their friends and not for authorities.  This might lead to loss in trust in the government by the people.

This blog post is comment on Jaruphong Sapkiree’s blog post regarding whether “Apple Pay” might be a game-changing play for Apple.

Apple is trying to succeed in getting consumers to cast aside physical wallets and use their phones to pay at the checkout counter where Google and others so far have large failed at.  As one of the biggest pioneering companies, Apple is expecting positive feedback for Apple pay.

I tend to agree with Jaruphong’s point of view, as it wouldn’t be a booming success, it has been forecasted due to the private security problems it encountered before with iCloud, intercepting passwords, iMessages, photos and contacts.  Users won’t be able to give their credentials to Apple any time soon due to the incident.  However, as technologies grow and people’s desire to possess easiness and convenience in life, electronic payment will be dominating the industry in the near future.