” If the United Nations was fully funded why would we need the Arc or social enterprise”?

The purpose of the United Nation, Social Enterprise and Arc Initiative are the same. The goal of these three organizations is to make the world a better place by providing assistance to underprivileged people and solution to solve the existing social issues. However, the structures and operations between the United Nation and Social Enterprise & Arc Initiative are quite different.

 United Nation receives lots of fund to provide large scale of assistance to both environmental disasters and social issues. It acts like a World Police to keep peace of all countries and protect human rights.  In comparison, Arc Initiative and Social Enterprise have limit access to capital (resources, labours, financial aids, technology) support system. They are generated by social value to connect people from different global communities and to establish fostering relationship through the sharing of the knowledge to increase the economic well being in these communities.

In my perspective, Arc Initiative and Social Enterprise are more inspirational than the United Nation. United Nation donates resources and supervises international behaviours to maintain security and living standards as a way to tackle the issues. However, Arc initiative and Social Enterprise take actions to directly impacting the society. For instance, Arc Initiative establishes programs for a collaborated learning with the community while Social Enterprise innovates many solutions to provide opportunity for uneducated people to become self-sufficient with the exchange of business skills and support of microloans.

I am interested in this blog because I am also a fan of Tim Horton. The reason for it to have strong customer loyalty for decades in such a competitive industry is because of the high quality of services and variety of products it offered. Unique products like Iced Capp as author has mentioned helps Tim Horton to achieve great differentiation and thus avoid the loss from large competition. It seems that the company has much market power in the industry, however, I agreed with the author that the plan of raising price of coffee due to the price hike of beans will still cause the company to lose buyers and eventually lead to a decrease in profits.

To maintain the customer loyalty and keep the company remains profitable, the author has suggested the company to shift from cost leadership strategy to differentiation strategy. It is a very good idea and the company should definitely consider about it; nevertheless, differentiation strategy can also bring some risks at the same time. For example, the products it produce may only be valued by a certain amount of customers. Plus, it is costly and time-consuming for a company to implement this strategy. And before the company can achieve a strong brand image that sets it apart from the competition, the company is also facing the risk of changing consumer tastes. Therefore, in order for the company to proceed a successful differentiation strategy, scientific research is needed. One improvement which the author can make is to suggest different market research methods to the company such as collecting primary data or secondary data from previous researches or directly from the consumer.

In addition to the author’s blog, differentiation-focused strategy is another strategy that the company can adopt. The advantages of this strategy are that the company can enjoy high level of customer loyalty and each of its unique product focuses on only small number of target market segments. As a result, the company is able to ensure that it does meet customer’s needs and wants. Meanwhile, it can create greater differentiation by providing products that are clearly different from competitors who are targeting a broader group of customers. The great differentiation can help the company passes its costs on to the customer without high price elasticity of demand since substitute products are very rare.

In Class 18, three Sauder alumni were being invited to talk about their experience of establishing their companies. The one that most impressed me was Tangoo. It is a website and an app that have a specific target market and the company itself focuses on value proposition to help the customer design the place for social outing based on their current mood.

Although it has many difficulties such as start-up capital dried up in the first place; however, the blog described that after revising its old model to the new concept “pocket concierge”, Tangoo has grown its user to 2,000 in Vancouver and is expanding in provinces like Toronto, Montreal, and Calgary. The reason for this success may credit to the idea of  reducing their consumers time to organize dates. Many people have the same worry on wasting a lot of time to decide locations and prices and often time people will change their decision with the changes of their moods on the day of the meeting. However, Tangoo’s app can help us to easily solve this problem because it will recommend you food and cocktail locations that best fits you after your selection of mood and types of event. I’ve took the initiative to use this app once, and I found that it is really useful.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/small-business/sb-managing/leadership/dinner-planning-company-re-emerges-overnight-as-pocket-concierge/article20898113/

This article states that Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment Ltd has chose and signed a 10-year deal with Canadian Tire as its sponsorship partner. The fact that Canadian Tire is a Canadian company has helped the company to win the favor of MLSE company. Oftentimes, the culture can affect many transactions and collaborations in the market. For example, the customer may decide to purchase local domestic products than  imported products and  company may decides to partner up with local company.

The contract with MLSE will only benefit Canadian Tire in the long-term. Why? Sponsoring  MLSE’s sports team provides the opportunity for the company to free advertise itself and to participate in more retail chains such as operating MLSE apparel shop. Through apparel shop, Canadian Tire is offering unique attributes that are valued by fans (customers) from different sports team and thus the company may achieve great differentiation in the industry.  This will greatly enlarge the sector of target market, increasing customers who have strong loyalty to their favorable teams. While the company is experiencing benefit of charging a premium price due to the uniqueness of sports properties, it can also prevent other competitors from copying.

Other than Canadian Tire, many retailers such as Wal-Mart Corp., National Sports, Mark’s and etc had also competed for a spot to be involved in the sponsorship.  A quote said by Steven Lewis “Companies are always looking for new ways to connect with consumers.” can help to explain why there is a large competition in the sports market and also in any market. This can also related to Channel segment in business model canvas which we discussed in the class. Example like sponsorship marketing can help the company to reach to their customer segment and achieve cost-efficient.

Professional sports company or sports league are also taking advantage of having sponsors to be the backup when it is  facing potential risks. The company often turns capital raised through the deal into re-investment of the company (operation, hold events).

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/industry-news/marketing/canadian-tire-takes-over-as-mlse-sports-team-sponsor/article14207122/

As the importance of social media grew rapidly these years, it is well known that many people used the site as sources of entertainment, information research, and connection with other people. However, after reading Cecilia Larson’s blog post about Facebook’s expansion in the healthcare, I was surprised by the fact that many users actually will search for health advice.

According to my own research, 40% of people will look for health related consumer reviews and 1/3 of people will seek for help on medical treatments, drugs, and health plans. It seems like nowadays many patients have more awareness on the condition of their health and  social media has become the platform where they can find out the solutions by talking to people who have the similar symptoms before. This has also become the initiative for Facebook executive to start programming different health care applications to show business ethics for attracting more customers and therefore, increasing the profits.

It is good to see that  Facebook is touching the field of healthcare because it reflects that the company has a picture of  its customer segment and an idea to develop further relationship with its customers. However, I am wondering  if the company has also include value proposition into the plan. Because the amount of demands that can be meet and the amount of pain that can be reduce for the customer through applications are crucial for the company’s plan to succeed and thus increase its profits.

Because the place where people of First Nation lived are mostly protected; therefore, most of the oil company are often trying to extract the resources from these areas. However, they need to consider social and cultural trends of these aboriginal people. The perspective of natives are opposed to the company because they consider land as their most important living resources. Therefore, the company has to create an revenue attractiveness by signing an agreement of sharing profits with the domestic people in order for them to stop defending and allowing the company to start digging oils or building pipelines across the land. 

However, the need and demand of the aboriginal people is huge, they do not satisfy with the consistent income but also searching for rights and title of the land. This will affect and lead to the alter of the oil company’s business model because the model is restricted by the conflict between the government and the aboriginal people. The government will not easily to agree to give title of land and rights to the aboriginal people since in the past, the court and the officials discarded these people’s rights and the litigation of the aboriginal people have been processed unlawfully.

Therefore, in order for the company to have a business model that can be commence successfully, the company has to plan and add the solution to the business model for solving the external market issues. For example, in the article, the company has set up a regular meeting with the aboriginal people with the involvement of the government officials to build up a more position relationship amongst the three parties. 

T

he recent news reveals that one of the largest financial institution, JP Morgan, had been attacked by an unknown group from Russia. In addition to this blockbuster, another nine institutions were discovered to have experience the similar attack from the same organization. Many questions then arise from the public,among all these, one concern that catches my attention is the topic on the vulnerability of the security system and the lack of regulation on protecting millions of customers’ best interest.

Apparently, the irresponsible action of the companies is the trigger of this tragedy. If the companies were able to spot the intrusion of the computer system immediately, then million of customer accounts will not be reviewed by people with an unjustified approach. Thus, the advance of the security system is of necessity for the company to avoid the financial crisis that can cause by the illegal use of customer information.

The financial institution cannot be the only one that was bng criticized. According to the article, the institution is allowed to report any crisis to the customer after a month, and such an unethical action is caused by the lack of the government regulation. So here comes a question, where is our customer’s right?  If the cyberattack is going to repeat, the biggest victim will be these customers who build trust on both the government and the financial institution. However, the customer is the one who is paying the money for both communities to survive. Therefore, the government should impose restricted regulation to make the firm report more transparent to the customer.

On the report of Oxam, it ranked the Top 10 food companies based on the seven factors such as the transparency of each company’s supply chain and their protection of Labors’ rights.
The report shows that the lowest rated company, UK food giant Associated British Foods, have the worst policies on its treatment of workers. Especially, women who are working on the supply chain were being treated unrespectfully. The violation of Labor’s right has always been mentioned and questioned by the politics and society. Although many parties are constantly putting pressure on these companies; however, these companies have only acknowledged the need to change but lack a significant commitment to solve the problem. What the company didn’t notice is that the policies and actions may cause the loss of workforce. People will not be working for the company afterwards if the company does not enfore ethical standards.
Another ethical problem that appears in the article is that most of the food companies did not provide report or information about the ingredients of their products and the processes of reducing their environmental footprints. It seems that these companies are more focused on earning the profit by neglecting business ethic; however, in the long run, they may start to lose its fixed consumers and public trust. Because on the consumers side, they have the right to know the productive process and the quality of the products which they’re consuming.
In order for a business to be successful, business ethic is always the primary thing that the company have to consider. By looking at the importance of each stakeholder and moreover, creating value and profits that lead the interest of stakeholders (customers, suppliers, employees, communities, etc) to go in the same direction can help the company to both achieve social responsibilities and gain profits.

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-21582992

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