While browsing through my classmates’ blogs, this interesting post “How Long Will “Wang Hong Store”–Heytea Stay Popular?” written by my friend Shujing Li caught my attention. In her blog, she decides to address a current prevailing phenomenon within the Chinese food industry called “Wang Hong Stores.” These stores use a type of online marketing strategy where numerous amount of appealing photos are posted on some of the biggest Chinese social media in order to attract customers and build strong brand recognition. I personally experience the craziness when I went to Shanghai where hundreds of people are lining up in front of the Heytea shop, waiting hours to get a cup of drink. However, in Shujing’s Blog, she claims that after people make their first purchase, they would not want to line up hours to get the product anymore and this trend will eventually vanish which I totally agree.

After reading this blog, I felt a connection between these Chinese stores and the trendy Muji stores around the world. Although they are not in the same industry, people are willing to line up for hours in both cases. Therefore, I decided to contrast these two types of business models and explain why in my opinion, Muji will keep its customers in long-term, unlike Heytea.

Long lineup at Muji Metrotown opening day

The first major difference between these two businesses is obviously the products they offer to their customers. What Heytea sells are essentially fancy drinks, they might be appealing to the customers at the beginning, but people will gradually lose interest in them because these are not necessities in our lives. On the other hand, Muji is a retail company that sells furniture, clothing and other consumer goods. These products are very essential for people and by providing a varied selection of good quality goods, it is easy for Muji to build up customer loyalty.

Muji’s high-quality products

The key element of Heytea’s early success is their online marketing strategy and strong brand recognition. One uniqueness about Muji is that they have little to none advertisement. Its name literally translates to “brandless quality goods,” so as you can imagine, they have no logo and no brand on their products. Nonetheless, this does not mean that Muji has no marketing strategy. They specifically choose cities like Toronto and Vancouver to launch their stores first because there is already a large Asian customer base who would support the brand and spread out the company’s name by word-of-mouth.

After contrasting these two companies, it is evident that Muji’s business model is much more effective in long-term. The underlying problem with Heytea’s marketing strategy taught me that maintaining the initial success that a company creates is often a more important and challenging task.

Word Count: 448

Images:

http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/post/18627/we-tried-it-the-cheese-tea-with-a-cult-following-in-china

http://dailyhive.com/vancouver/muji-store-vancouver-metropolis-at-metrotown-lines-crowds-2017

https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/413064597055840092/

Entrepreneurship has always been one of my favourite subjects within business studying because I desires to create new things and to improve my world. During the lecture from last week, I was introduced to this new term “intrapreneurship,” defined as “the act of behaving like an entrepreneur while working within a large organization.” Since it is closely connected to entrepreneurship, I decided to explore it further by reading some blogs that relates to this concept.

The blog “Intrapreneurship: A Win-Win Situation” by Shana Labrecque lists all the strengths of intrapreneurship from both the entrepreneur’s perspective and the company’s perspective. I found the post very helpful and easy to understand because it includes a very detailed mind map that correlates individual workers and the whole company.

From these information that Shana provides, I found a few main difference between entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship. For instance, an intrapreneur uses the company’s resource to initiate and develop their projects that usually aim to change or renew an existing system. Therefore, all the risks are taken by the company whereas for an entrepreneurship, it is the other way around. However, if an intrapreneurship is successful, it can potentially bring huge benefits to the company such as differentiating the company from its competitors, optimizing the company’s resources and capturing new market growth.

Although the term entrepreneurship appears more often in our lives, intrapreneurship has also changed our world significantly. Many of us might not know that Gmail, one of the most essential applications in our daily lives today, is a product of intrapreneurship. Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmail was able to work on his project from 2001 to 2004 because Google allows its employees to spend 20% of their work days to develop new ideas and projects. When Gmail came out, “it was the first email with a successful search feature and the option to keep all of your email instead of frantically deleting to stay under your limit.”

Google’s trust and support for its employees is the key reason why they can stay at the top of its industry for so many years. After reading Shana’s blog and incorporate it with a real example, I found that intrapreneurship and entrepreneurship have very different meanings for different businesses and are equally important. It is obvious that a successful entrepreneurship brings the individual more benefits. But in my opinion, an intrapreneurship is much more likely to succeed because you have the numerous amount of support from both your company and your colleagues. Therefore, depending on each individual’s own situation, the person can choose between these two approaches in order to practice, develop their ideas and ultimately improve the world we are living in today.

Word Count: 445

Images:

1. https://www.vocoli.com/blog/may-2014/10-inspiring-examples-of-successful-intrapreneurship/
2. https://intrapreneurialinitiative.org/intrapreneurship-a-win-win-situation/
3. http://logos.wikia.com/wiki/Gmail

If you are not an art enthusiast or professional artist, painting is typically seen as a time consuming activity enjoyed by kids. Because as an adult, even if someone wants to relax himself by doing some fun activities, playing some sports or going to the bar would be seen as more efficient options than sitting in front of a piece of paper. Nonetheless, this stereotypical view is broken by the trendy “paint-and-sip” class. This creative business model is fairly easy to understand because just like the name stated, it is essentially a mixture between art and alcohol, each person pay roughly about $35 to $65 to study how to paint and drink their favourite beverage at the same time.

This little twist might sounds very simple, but the idea has gained numerous amount of popularity with  “an estimated 1000 wine and painting party companies in the United States and Canada.” The reason why this specific innovation is able to stand out among thousands of entrepreneurial ideas is that it looks deep into what the consumers actually need and also reduces customers’ costs and risks for going to a bar. These are all downstream activities performed by the business, in another word, customer related activities.

In the article “When Marketing Is Strategy,” the author Niraj Dawar classifies all business strategies into two big categories, upstream activities and downstream activities. Based on his definition, upstream activities are the actions that a company take in order to improve their product or to reduce cost. On the other hand, any downstream activity is a company’s will to shape customer perception and to reduce customer costs. Throughout the article, Dawar strongly suggests businesses to tilt towards downstream activities since these activities actually help the business to build trust with the customers and gain accumulative advantages.

In the example of wine and painting company, the business focuses heavily on building connection with customers and shaping a new customer perception towards the painting activity. Because at the end of the day, every single customer has a job to be done, so when the paint-and-sip idea stands at the customer’s point of view and satisfies their needs to get relaxed , their success is inevitable. Imagine if instead of providing alcohol during the class, the business decides to hire better teachers or install better equipments, they would still gain positive outcome but it would certainly not be as dramatically as the paint-and-sip idea. Therefore, from my perspective, if the paint-and-sip industry wants to accumulate their advantage in the future, they should improve the customer experience by performing more downstream activities because the anticipation of experiences is more precious than the anticipation of buying merchandise.

Word Count: 445

Images:

Paintingwithatwistfranchise.com. (2017). Leading Concept | Painting With a Twist. [online] Available at: https://paintingwithatwistfranchise.com/leading-concept [Accessed 16 Oct. 2017].

Harvard Business Review. (2017). When Marketing Is Strategy. [online] Available at: https://hbr.org/2013/12/when-marketing-is-strategy [Accessed 16 Oct. 2017].

If you have ever visited London and been onto the world-famous London Eye, you would probably want a similar architectural masterpiece that can represent your city as well. Visionary developer and investor Meir Laufer saw the underlying commercial value within in it, and decided to bring a wheel to New York by teaming up with the London Eye’s lead engineers. The 630-foot-tall New York Wheel located in St. George, Staten Island is expected to attract 4.5 million passengers per year, create more than 1,000 jobs while having a maximum capacity of 1,440 people per ride.

Originally, the project was scheduled to begin in 2014 and end in late 2015. However, this plan has been delayed a number of times due to various factors such as  inferior welds on the giant legs of the wheel, defective pads which the wheel will sit on and a bad attachment between the wheel and the pad. But regardless of these details, one of the most significant causes of these delays is the miscommunication between the developers and the European construction team Mammoet-Starneth. On May 26, the construction company withdrew from the worksite because of the timing of the project as well as a payment dispute. It is quite interesting to find that a multi million project can also have such dilemma that typically happens within students’ teamwork.

Nonetheless, when analyzing their cooperation, their team does lack elements like supportive context and shared mindset which are crucial for effective teamwork. The absence of supportive context is clearly shown by their dispute on the topic of payment and in addition to that, the Mammoet-Starneth also suggests that there was ­“insufficient soil support and parts that don’t work.” When one part of the team(in this case the construction team) does not receive the support they desire, dissatisfaction will eventually lead to fatal conflicts. Despite the lack of support, the developers accused the construction company for “two years of self-inflicted delays and extortionate ­attempts to extract additional payments totaling more than 50 percent of the agreed contract price.” This rigorous accusation reveals the fact that the two parts of the team certainly did not have a good relationship and a shared mindset since the beginning. The misunderstanding that was resulted by miscommunication is the essential reason of why their teamwork did not work out well.

Now, because of this immature teamwork, a ferris wheel that was suppose to be completed two years ago only has its foundation and a terminal station installed by the construction team. Realizing the fact that some enormous projects operated by multiple international companies can also fall into such a chaotic situation helps us to really understand the importance of effective teamwork.

Word Count:  439

Citation:

Anon, (2017). [online] Available at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meir-laufer-b671895b    [Accessed 26 Sep. 2017].

McGeehan, P. (2017). Completion Date of Staten Island’s Giant Wheel Still Up in the Air. [online] Nytimes.com. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/14/nyregion/completion-date-of-staten-islands-giant-wheel-is-up-in-the-air.html [Accessed 26 Sep. 2017].

New York Post. (2017). Staten Island Ferris wheel project is spinning out of control. [online] Available at: http://nypost.com/2017/06/25/staten-island-ferris-wheel-project-is-spinning-out-of-control/ [Accessed 26 Sep. 2017].

En.wikipedia.org. (2017). New York Wheel. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Wheel#External_links [Accessed 26 Sep. 2017].

Web.b.ebscohost.com. (2017). EBSCO Publishing Service Selection Page. [online] Available at: http://web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=1&sid=f7a2b0a0-b293-4ed2-b165-1ed36e0e2315%40sessionmgr101 [Accessed 26 Sep. 2017].

Ny.curbed.com. (2017). Curbed NY Archives – Staten Island Observation Wheel – Page 1. [online] Available at: https://ny.curbed.com/staten-island-observation-wheel/archives [Accessed 26 Sep. 2017].

In recent years, China’s air pollution has become a serious nationwide problem that is affecting hundred millions of people. The air particle PM2.5 produced by factories is a type of pollutant that can be inhaled by the and cause many health issues. In the article “China’s citizens are complaining more loudly about polluted air”, the author gives a specific example that took place in Daqing, China, where thousands of people demonstrated outside of the city’s government headquarter to resist the plan of building aluminum factories. The projected was later canceled by authorities, therefore, the company that developed this project undoubtedly suffered from it.

This type of event leads us to a question about business ethics: should businesses sacrifice themselves to fulfill other stakeholders benefits or should they only focus on making more profit?

In American economist Milton Friedman’s article “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits,” Friedman strongly disagrees with the argument that businesses have social responsibilities. His main argument is that only human can have responsibilities, not a business or a company. But if we think closely, a company can be seen as a group of individuals gathered together to reach a common objective. Despite making a profit, each individual has their responsibilities to others, and together, the business surely has its responsibilities to all of its stakeholders.

When we look into the example of air pollution, despite public citizens, many other stakeholders are also influenced by it. For instance, the workers in the company are heavily affected because research shows that a change of 10 units of PM2.5 can decrease worker’s productivity by an outstanding 6%. Therefore, if a company does not care about business ethics at all and continues to pollute excessively, their profit would not necessarily grow since their workers’ productivity would also fall significantly.

To sum up my point, people sometimes do not consider business ethics as a necessary responsibility for a company because it is a common understanding that a company’s main objective is to simply increase the profit. However, a company that does not bother with business ethics definitely would not be able to survive in the competitive market due to the fact that every single stakeholder has an impact on the business. If a company loses the support from one entire group of people, it can potentially lead to a disaster and damage the business heavily. At the end of the day, it is always nice to do other people a favor because, most of the time, people who help others receive satisfaction and benefits as well.

Word Count: 430

Citations:

China’s citizens are complaining more loudly about polluted air. (2017, March 02). Retrieved September 13, 2017, from https://www.economist.com/news/china/21717975-government-wants-silence-them-chinas-citizens-are-complaining-more-loudly-about-polluted-air

Zimmerli, W. C., Richter, K., & Holzinger, M. (Eds.). (n.d.). Corporate Ethics and Corporate Governance. Retrieved September 13, 2017, from https://link-springer-com.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-3-540-70818-6.pdf

Ferro, S. (2015, June 20). The pollution outside your office window affects your work in a big way. Retrieved September 13, 2017, from http://www.businessinsider.com/pollution-affects-labor-productivity-2015-6

Chinese Air Pollution Kills 4,000 People Each Day (And Why It Will Kill Many More). (2015, August 13). Retrieved September 13, 2017, from http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-08-14/chinese-air-pollution-kills-4000-people-each-day-and-why-it-will-kill-many-more

Business Ethics Corporate Social Responsibility and Governance BA8401 Anna University Management of Business Science MBA. (n.d.). Retrieved September 13, 2017, from http://www.brainkart.com/subject/Business-Ethics-Corporate-Social-Responsibility-and-Governance_120/