In 2009, the huge online shopping website Taobao owned by Alibaba had introduced their one-day shopping festival on “Double Eleven”, or Nov 11, which is also known as the Chinese day dedicated to single, uncommitted people. Alibaba reached 80% of their online market shares on this specific day and there was an estimated 120,000 payments each minute. Haipei Jia analyzed Alibaba’s huge success by its differentiation marketing strategy. However, from my perspective, those huge successes were based on Alibaba’s prudential market researches, and their targeting to improve certain steps of  “Consumer’s Decision Journey” .

When it comes to online shopping festivals, market research becomes very important. Alibaba needs to do researches about consumer’s preferences and ensure that they have placed the most popular products in the most obvious spots on the website page. Alibaba needs to broadcast the potential payment amounts and adjust the capacities of the checking out system to make sure every payment can be processed correctly and fluently. They also need to update capacity of delivery companies and product supply companies. Obviously, these market researches and preparations are there to guarantee the customer a satisfied shopping experience.

In addition, the “consumer’s decision journey” starts with ‘considering’, followed by ‘evaluation’, and ‘bonding’. What really matters most is that whether customer buys the product or not. What if the two steps before ‘purchasing’ disappeared, or barely existed. In other words, what if we could limit or shorten the time that the consumer spent on these two steps. When Alibaba limits the consumer’s time of hesitating and evaluating, instead of losing a potential customer, Alibaba actually benefits from hundreds of rational payments. Eventually, even if the profit that Alibaba can gain from selling one product became lower than usual, when a lot of purchases are being made, Alibaba is still making an incredibly large profit.

References:

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34773940

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/11/10/worlds-biggest-1-day-sale-happening-now-in-china.html

(Source)

http://www.mckinsey.com/Insights/Marketing_Sales/The_new_consumer_decision_journey?cid=digital-eml-alt-mip-mck-oth-1510

http://tech.qq.com/a/20141216/006117.htm

I oppose Toms Shoes’ “one for one” business model, while supporting SoleRebels’ business model that helps people in poverty and creates eco-friendly value.

Especially, I strongly agree with the opinion of Widmer-“ To give anything is always a bad idea when you’re trying to fight poverty.” This is simply because poor people are not poor because they lack of resources. To use a statement made by Miller-“Poor people aren’t poor because they lack stuff; they’re poor because they lack the infrastructure to create wealth.” There is also an old saying in China that says “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” When you decided to give the poor things to help them, you are actually helping them in the easiest way. So, in terms of Toms Shoes’s “one for one” business model, giving stuff to help the poor has actually created more difficulties for them than benefits. From my perspective, If a company wants to reduce poverty, it needs to find a solution that can guarantee the permanence of the benefit it brought. For instance, teaching people a life-supporting skill.

On the contrary, if we are talking about an entrepreneur that starts up a business from poor areas, like SoleRebels, the circumstances are different, and so is the goal that the company is pursuing. I think companies building in relatively poor areas should be making good use of recyclable resources (free resources), and creating as much job opportunities as possible, for gaining profit. As long as those companies are not losing money, those companies are able to support local economy, and can be said to be successful.

References:

http://www.solerebels.com/pages/our-founder#video

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/one-one-business-model-social-impact-avoiding-unintended-consequences/

(Source)

https://sustainablefashionformen.wordpress.com/2014/05/25/out-of-africa-solerebels-eco-footwear-for-men/

https://blogs.ubc.ca/jessicatse/2014/09/09/business-ethics-toms-shoes/

After this week’s lecture, I found myself interested in the Organizational Behavior of a company, specifically Zappos’ holacracy and HR decisions.

Zappos uses the holacracy management style which requires a lot of people in the company to achieve self-management and self-organization. To facilitate this style of management, Zappos believed that everyone in the company should be treated equally and be given the right to manage their own job in order to achieve the greatest benefit. Yesterday, I found a report of  Zappos’ employees’ disagreement of its holacracy system. To be honest, I do not think holacracy is an efficient management system to use in order to run a company. We have to admit that people are different and have developed into various specializations. If we realize that every single person had put in a different amount of effort to become who they are today, we might find the traditional top-down approach of management is more reasonable than holacracy.

In addition, there is no doubt that Zappos has done a great job in benefitting workers by making HR decisions. Normally, a company that is able to benefit workers is always gaining profit and has a good reputation amongst businesses such as Google. This is caused by employees realizing that they have been valued and respected by the company. Zappos appreciates its employees as well as its customers. Zappos has free food, snacks, and drinks available 24-hour a day. They also provide their employees a decent free T-shirt when an event happened. Employees are encouraged to personalize their desk. Zappos also holds entertainment competitions in their offices to help employees relax during work. When employees have a good time working in Zappos, the benefits reaped include the improved work efficiency, enhanced company reputation and delivery of friendly attitudes to customers. As a product selling company, a series of employee-benefit HR decisions granted Zappos success.

Reference:

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/05/11/zappos-employees-not-cool-with-holacracy.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/business/10corner.html?_r=0

(Source)

http://blog.crowdspring.com/2010/06/delivering-happiness-zappos/

https://www.bankmobile.com/inspired-by-the-culture-at-zappos/

http://about.zappos.com/press-center/media-kit

Recently, I have read a passage about competitions in the field of smart phones in China. I’m surprised by the big growth of the market share of Xiaomi’s products. On August 3rd 2015, there was a report posted that Apple had lost the top spot in the Chinese smart phone market to Xiaomi. Apparently, Xiaomi must have developed its own strength in order to defeat Apple. From my perspective, Xiaomi had successfully positioned itself as a low cost version of the “Apple product” and marketed towards a younger target audience. While Kyle commented Xiaomi succeed because of its middle or low end products and timing flexibility in terms of launching new product , I think its customized Chinese marketing strategy contributed more to its selling surge in China.

Generally speaking, Xiaomi’s products are known for their decent build quality, lightness, touch screen, and most importantly, unbelievably low price. It is not hard to realize that Apple’s smart phone has every feature similar to that of Xiaomi’s, except the low price. Obviously, low cost is part of the most important reasons of Xiaomi’s success in China.

Otherwise, When Xiaomi decided to set its slogan as “Born for You, Burn for MI !”，it’s already targeted the key customer segment to the young, which is undeniably also one of the most important customer segments of whole smart phone market.  In order to attract young people, Xiaomi made advertisements by connecting it’s smart phone to dreams, faith, and passions of life. When young people began to use a brand of product, this brand always spread amongst the crowd swiftly. Eventually, relentlessly growing popularity could lead to a gaining of profit for Xiaomi.

(The picture is saying that”Always believe that good thing will happen soon.”)

Currently, Xiaomi is known as the biggest Chinese seller of smart phones that ranked as the world’s third biggest phone seller, trailing only Apple and Samsung. I think that, in the near future, Xiaomi smart phone company is highly expected to succeed in the worldwide market.

Reference:

http://www.cnet.com/news/apple-loses-top-spot-in-chinese-smartphone-market/

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-32592206

http://fortune.com/2015/08/03/apple-third-place-china/

(Source)

http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/30/xiaomis-one-more-thing/

http://www.androidauthority.com/xiaomi-taiwan-india-399394/

In class we have talked about innovations and entrepreneurship. One type of innovation, called the disruptive innovation, came to mind when I was reading the news about Wal-Mart’s new drone delivery system. Wal-Mart has explored a so-called delivery drone facility which is able to provide home delivery, curbside pickup, and checking warehouse inventories. In terms of the delivery industry that includes land transportation, air transportation, and water transportation. The delivery drones services could be categorized as a technical disruption.  

Although the new delivery drones are commonly agreed to have commercial potential and have been tested by several large companies such as Wal-Mart and Amazon, there is no legal permission for the commercial use of delivery drones. Thus, I do not look forward to this new delivery invention, regardless the potential growth of delivery efficiency that it might facilitate.

In addition, there are also some practical problems of delivery drones when firms use them to deliver goods to customers. The factors that companies want to consider include the natural weather problem, safety problem and packing problem (ex. what if a fragile good such as a glass bottle is to be delivered).  As a matter of fact, I would rather wait for a couple more days and receive the good that I bought in-hand than pick it up in front yard when I go back home at night and take the risk that it might be stolen.

All in all, while there are surely some disruptive innovations showed to be successful such as iTunes, not every disruptive innovation in business would end up being actually disruptive.

Reference:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/wal-mart-drones-1.3290313

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/27/business/walmart-seeks-permit-to-do-tests-with-drones.html?_r=0

(Source)

http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/walmart-joins-race-to-use-drones-for-home-delivery/