Following our latest tutorial about information systems and how they track me at all times and during every second of the day I have been pretty shaken up about it and I am feeling powerless to stop the giant machine that is capitalism, but hey why not be another cog in an efficient machine? So, I have been looking through some blogs about marketing, and how different businesses deal with it, I looked at two friend’s blogs about marketing Vivian Ku’s and Adrien De laitre’s. Vivian discusses the use of market analysis by Nintendo to better improve the market segment in which they  should operate and where they stand with the consumers and how that helped them gain back consumer confidence and helped increase revenue for Nintendo. On the other hand, Adrien discusses how Market segments act differently in his Tesla review, and how the workings of one market are not translatable to another.

Vivian’s blog talked about how the hegemonic values of the company, Nintendo, hindered their growth; she talks about how Nintendo’s branding was heavily set into consoles and console gaming. This added to their refusal to expand to different markets and different platforms in which they could operate their products in, for example, they were so adamant about not getting into mobile gaming that they were missing a statistically huge slice of the pie, in market share terms. Nintendo decided to move into mobile gaming industry thanks to the market analysis that they did. They were making more revenue from the software rather than hardware, and the amount of software they can sell is limited to the amount of hardware, therefore in order to sell more software they are thinking of adjoining with smartphone technology to broaden their marketability and hopefully that will remedy the fall in sales. In my opinion, it was a very  smart idea for Nintendo to broaden into the mobile market, not only as a smart business decision but also as a very smart decision for fans like me.

Adrien’s blog focused on the opposite end of the spectrum, Tesla is a high-end, luxury car manufacturer that  has recently tried to venture into the market of affordable electric cars. However, they went from one end of the market to the other and they did not adjust appropriately. In the ‘high-end luxury’ market, there is rarely much advertisement and marketing associated with their products. The market is characterized by the lack of advertisements, and this has been working for tesla so far. However, translating that success onto a different market did not work as expected for tesla.

KU, V.

The Return of Super Mario – Vivian Ku’s Blog

DE LAITRE, A.

too good or another problem, teslas marketing

So this morning I was reading up on the fact that Donald Trump is, in fact, the new president of the USA, and thus far I can tell you that the future is not looking as bright as his orange skin does. I know I am one of many people who will be writing about trump and his ideals, but as absurd as his ideas may sound they may actually come true in the future; and having both legal and illegal family in the US it really really scares me down to the core as to what the future may hold.

I will be talking about the direct aftermath that electing trump has had on the US and its denizens. I will be using stimuli from the Huffington post to write my blog. The blog from the Huffington post that I am going to review is about the difference reactions people have had with the election and about the aftermath. I think Huffington post is a very good and reliable source as they use moderators to keep management of their blogging staff; furthermore, the blog I am using has snippets and images from different social media that reflect perfectly the ethos of the general public, it tells the story of the people without a secret agenda.

From the stimuli in the blog, it is clear that there is a severe problem with trump being president-elect, the problem is not Trump alone, it’s his ideals; his homophobic, racist, hate filled ideals. His supporters have been poisoned by them and have lost most if not all of their decorum, attacking others, vandalizing territory, threatening foreigners. Trump’s supporters seem to believe that just because he is president-elect they are allowed to be as inhumanly racist as possible.

Prime example of this is the fact that people of foreign decent have already been asked to move to the back of the bus… reminiscent of the ‘equal but separate’ ideology that was fueled back in segregation times; one vote, one person, one idea, and the whole country has been set back fifty years. The ideologies that president-elect Trump has spread are not ideals of peace or of unity, they are of hate and separation, not only does this further split apart the people it also fuels hate between them; This is not how a country should function.

PEOPLE SHARE FRIGHTENING IMAGES IN THE AFTERMATH OF TRUMP’S VICTORY

In this blog, I am going to discuss how marketing can lead a product that is intrinsically valueless, like diamonds, to success. How marketing can be used to propagate the idea of apparent value and how people can be tricked out of thousands of dollars with clever marketing.

The well-known adage “diamonds are a girl’s best friend” was manufactured by De beers in the late 1930s, when de beers saw a stagnation in their revenue. [i]The stagnation lead them to move to New York and hiring an advertising company. The prices of diamonds were falling, people were not buying diamonds and without the same appreciation for the stones De beers had to in some way manufacture demand for their product, and that is exactly what they did. The pioneered one of the first and most successful advertisement campaigns in history, they manage to equivocate the love of a man to the size of the diamond ring that they could buy you. They did it with clever taglines “diamonds are forever”, “diamonds are girl’s best friend” and a lot of celebrity endorsement and that managed to convince the average consumer into buying the precious stones.

Diamonds are intrinsically worthless, meaning that they have no real value, the only value they have is what is perceived. At the beginning of the 1800s diamonds were valued so highly because only monarchs were available to afford them. Therefore, the stakeholders of the diamond industry were only the British monarch[ii] at that point but when De Beers’ broke out of South Africa and started selling to a larger consumer base; most consumers only bought the diamonds to be more like the monarchy, back then Great Britain was very much appreciative of their monarchs…

Diamonds have relied heavily on things like monarchy and clever taglines for their value, and to be honest, this is preposterous; Gold, is valued highly because it is very rare, very good conductor, used to value currency. Diamonds are abundant, useless but they are pretty to look at. That is why De Beers equating diamonds to love was an incredibly smart move on their part. The made a valueless product like a diamond have emotional worth to the consumer increasing its value proposition when one buys a diamond they are no longer buying a super pressurised and heated chunk of coal, they are buying love and that is worth more than anything man can buy.[iii]

[i]

THE INCREDIBLE STORY OF HOW DE BEERS CREATED AND LOST THE MOST POWERFUL MONOPOLY EVER

[ii]

THE INCREDIBLE STORY OF HOW DE BEERS CREATED AND LOST THE MOST POWERFUL MONOPOLY EVER

[iii]

For this blog post I want to talk about child labor and the controversies behind it, what I will be talking about is from Primark’s situation, my dad’s experience with child labor, my experience with people who still advocate child labor and it is just my opinion on it. I will be using Primark as a stimulus

When Primark was found to have been using children as a way to keep their costs low the whole market was thrown out of whack, primary being the top producer of budget clothes and owning the biggest market share, its demise would have been very detrimental to its consumers. There are no substitutes for primary in the market so people just decided to slowly talk less and less about the fact that the sources of Primark’s goods were not ethical, this is due in part to the fact that a large majority of the public depends on Primark’s low-cost clothes and also the public is slowly getting charity saturation, ie, they see so many charities and horrible things happening worldwide start becoming mundane and less relevant. Therefore, the consumers stayed loyal. Primark lost a bit of money trying to recover their public standing but not much in comparison with the amount of revenue it receives.

That is the consumer side of the story, on the other side of the story. The producers were in third world countries in which labor laws are more flexible and they were employing children of all ages to work in sweatshops for as little as 60p a day (a little under a dollar a day). The children who were working there were being taken advantage off but, is it really all that bad? I am not advocating Primark’s decisions, but the parts in India in which they were using child labor were devoid of any education systems, there are copious amounts of children out on the streets making money any which way they can and there are even larger amounts of underage prostitution and drug trafficking in these areas. Getting a job in one of these sweatshops would be far more favorable than any of the other ways to make ends meet. At least in the sweatshops, there is a constant stream of revenue, and it assures that they can make ends meet.

My family was not always as well off as it is now, my dad began working as a builder for my grandfather as the ripe old age of 5, he was a cement mixer, this was all while still in school, the education system of Mexico at the time was nothing more than a joke, if it was not for the fact that my father’s whole family worked all 8 of them would not have survived to this point, they lived in a small mud shack and although child labour is not something that should be perceived as good, it’s still the very reason why some people today are alive. In the time of my parents, if you were not in working you would have been sold off to another family or just sold off into labor houses, if it wasn’t for the fact that my dad was started working from such a young age my aunts would have been sold off. Thanks to the money he got from his labor he was able to attend university and has far surpassed any expectations of him.

Child labor is detrimental to the children as it exploits them and underpays them, however, for some it is the best alternative. Yes, there are ways we can intervene but it is not like we can help every single child and there is no feasible way to fund the necessary upgrade on the education systems in third world countries. To be honest, it feels a bit hypocritical when developed economies look down on the underdeveloped economies for using child labour, it has been used by most if not all economies in the past, the British economy used it during the industrial revolution and if it was not for that it is possible that they would not have been able to develope to the point where child labour is no longer necessary.

I myself have no first-hand experience with child labor, being born into a prolific household, however, I have met people, families that are still tied with the idea of using children for labor. On one of my volunteer trips to Cambodia I experienced first hand that the children are not only exploited by the businesses but are also exploited by their parents in order for them to work more instead of studying, the parents who have not had any education themselves believe that labor is far more important than going to school.

Reference:

EXPOSED: PRIMARK’S SWEATSHOPS THAT PAY CHILDREN JUST 60P A DAY

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Volkswagen has recently come under fire for defrauding the clean air act in the US.  According to one of the engineers of VW, the problems arose in 2006, when they realized that they were not able to satisfy both of their main stakeholders. The government wanted an emission conscious motor, whilst the consumers wanted a powerful and reliable motor. The engineers were not abe to keep up with the demands of the consumers and the government, therefore they decided to please the consumers by producing a motor that was able to cheat the emissions test and could keep the consumers happy.

The repercussions of their decision to cheat the government has resulted in them losing billions of dollars and they have also lost face to the public, their consumer trust has basically swan dived to the floor, and in order to alleviate as much of the responsibility as possible they used their current CEO as a scapegoat and he resigned. For a company that has decided to turn their back on the government in order to please their consumers, to lose the trust of the consumers is the same as corporate suicide. They cheated on the test as a temporary solution, yet they never even tried to fix their emissions problems they just swept it under the rug in order to keep on gaining revenue without having to disclose their unethical management.

Two days ago on the ninth the court finally managed to capture and deem guilty one of the head engineers for VW, he stepped forward and claimed he was guilty of omission of the truth and breaking the trust of the government and consumers and for that he was guilty.

What VW did was unacceptable even if they were just trying to please their consumers, if they did not have the ability to meet the demands of the market they should not have cheated in order to be able to operate in the market. They cheated the government and their consumers and worst yet, they endangered the planet by not adhering to the clean air act of the US.

References:

ROGERS, A.

VW Engineer Pleads Guilty in Emissions-Cheating Scandal

GEUSS, M.

Volkswagen engineer pleads guilty in emissions scandal [Updated]