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/

Five provinces in Canada raised their minimum wage on Thursday, Oct 1st. Ryhs’s blog commented on this. According to him, this government plan is reckless and unachievable. He mainly pointed out that small businesses would be seriously affected. As a result, they would be forced to either raise the price of products or lay off the workers.

Nevertheless, I strongly agree with the minimum wage raise. Firstly, as the Alberta Federation of Labour’s acting president, Siobhan Vipond said, the increases are actually good for Albertans and good for local business. Because people in this wage level tend to spend their money locally, raising the minimum wages just means giving them a larger budget to put into the local economy. Similarly, to raise the minimum wage actually helps offset the inequity of Canadian income. Moreover, improving the minimum wage is a necessary step to enhance public welfare and people’s standard of living.  Also, the “fight for $15” is demonstrated to be achievable. For example, San Francisco, Seattle and Los Angeles have already passed 15 dollar minimum wage laws. Besides, to strengthen and assure work efficiency, all businesses should guarantee that their employees are the best. This means that their employees are able to support themselves by working for this specific company.

Reference:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/five-provinces-hike-minimum-wage/article26618941/

(Source)

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/03/12/bc-raises-minimum-wage-_n_6857768.html

In October 2nd, 2015, an Ikea-themed art exhibition was launched in England. This is clear proof of how successful Ikea is in the UK. There was another report posted on October 30th, 2012, saying that Ikea had changed the Warrington’s life in 25 years. It had suggested that one in five people sleep on an Ikea mattress, and more shockingly, one in 10 babies are conceived in Ikea beds. Indubitably, a huge success in business is always inseparable with a genius marketing strategy. Ikea is selling similar products with other furniture companies but in a completely different way.

Firstly, the Ikea company itself runs hundreds of research projects in order to learn about people’s lifestyle in different places. Through this process, Ikea researchers are able to understand people’s working habits, traveling habits, and even eating habits, in a specific area. Accordingly, Ikea would sell products that are most convenient for the locals.

Secondly, Ikea employees, which include both the artisan and the designer have tried their best to lower the cost through the productive progress.  Consequentially, Ikea is able to provide customers their  “breath-taking items” at an extremely low price. For example, instead of explaining the instruction in words, the brand designer draws it in several easy to understanding pictures in order to save the cost in the translating process.

Thirdly, Ikea helps consumers save the delivery cost of furnitures by offering compact cardboard packages. The packages are so convenient that customers could easily carry it in their cars and take it home by themselves.

References:

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20123362

http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-34423028

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/ikea-to-open-its-first-pick-up-point-store-in-london-ont-1.3072258

(Source)

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ikea-Brooklyn-Warehouse-Aisles.jpg

http://www.steveharvey.com/news/ikea-raises-minimum-pay-again/

In response to the increasing quality and quantity demands of food worldwide, a long-term effort have been made by food manufactures. Companies started to introduce chemical ingredients into their food products, known as food additives. However, with the addition of countless types of food additives, serious food safety problems, or business ethical problem, eventually came out.

In 2008 July 16th, Sanlu, which is a powdered milk company in China, was revealed to have been adding a poisonous ingredient in their powdered milk, which is melamine. It could cause kidney stones and other kidney damages to human.

In my own perspective, the melamine contamination event happened due to two  factors—external and internal. Internally, Sanlu did break the unspoken rule in business world, which is to “increase its profit so long as it stays within the rules of game, which is to say, engage in open and free competition without deception or fraud.” They focus on making more  profit and failed to take all their effort to guarantee the safety of their product.  To test the product comprehensively to ensure it is safe.  Externally, the government should also take responsibilities for their failure in strengthening the system of business law (the company didn’t put in effort to guarantee the safety of their products due to the loose enforcement of business law) and made it strict enough that company would abide by it. Besides, it generated a trust issue in Chinese powdered milk market. Especially, the people who believed in this brand of milk powder and bought it for their baby began to buy all food with imported brand rather than the domestic brands.

References ：

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7701477.stm

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0924224409001551

(Source)

https://www.google.ca/search?espv=2&tbm=isch&q=%E4%B8%89%E9%B9%BF%E5%A5%B6%E7%B2%89%E5%A9%B4%E5%84%BF&revid=605281761&sa=X&ved=0CB4Q1QIoBGoVChMI7qKR-rr9xwIVkaWICh1jUwFW&dpr=1&biw=1440&bih=731#imgrc=7OGkhWNcfpJUqM%3A

In the recent decade, many so-called illegal taxi services appeared in cities. Not only developed countries such as America and France began to have this kind of service, but also China, which is a developing country, has a taxi-calling service. On 25th June 2015, Uber, which is a taxi service company, had been banned by the French government due to its legal eligibility and the riots of rebellion it caused. Nevertheless, I think we have to admit the rationality of the appearance of the illegal taxi service. 

To delve into the essence of the illegal taxi issue, we cannot deny that the legally existing taxi service, namely the yellow cab, fails to satisfy everyone’s need.

For the yellow cab itself, there are some reason why people did not like and use it. Firstly, the unaffordable price and the long waiting time of those taxi services in the developed country are the obstacles of the taxi service. Secondly, unfriendly attitudes and untidy environment of the taxi in developing country made people always feel disappointed about the service.

For the government and sectors that control over the legitimate taxi industry, they should have done a better job to make taxi more accessible, more convenient and more affordable. Rather than spending time to ban the illegal taxi companies off their country, the government should strengthen the traditional taxi industry in order to make it more competitive amongst all taxi services.

References:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/03/revving-up

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34404692

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-33281896

(Source)

http://bbs.kafan.cn/thread-1837087-1-1.html

Nike entered the market of China back in 1980. By holding on to the concept “local for local”, Nike has continued to profit from the Chinese market since 1980. On September 25,  2015, Nike reported that its profit growth is largely helped by strong sale in China. Although China now is undergoing its most severe recession in economy in 25 years, Nike has experienced a 23% growth in sales profit in the last three months (August 31, 2015). There must be some explanation that accounts for this huge success of Nike. In my perspective, Nike’s success in China is largely dependent on its “customized” marketing strategies.

Firstly, the most admirable part of the Nike’s marketing strategy is that Nike primarily targets Chinese prides, or to say, Nike knows clearly about what Chinese people are proud of. Looking back into Chinese history,

the strongest part of the Chinese spirits is to be proud of our people as well as our country. Based on this key point, Nike hired Liu Xiang, who is the first Chinese champion of the sprint event in Olympic games, to represent their products.

Secondly, according to the great differences between Chinese and western culture, Nike came out a special strategy which solely targeted to those Chinese people who pursue western costume, individualism, and who want to be distinctive. More importantly, this strategy actually conformed to “the reform and opening-up policy” in China. As a result, Chinese people, especially teenager, shop a lot in the Nike store in order to have a unique, exotic dressing style.

References:

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34355627

(Source)

https://www.google.ca/search?q=%E8%80%90%E5%85%8B%E4%B8%AD%E5%9B%BD&espv=2&biw=1440&bih=828&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0CAgQ_AUoA2oVChMIr72MjoSeyAIVxyqICh141Qfg#tbm=isch&q=%E8%80%90%E5%85%8B+%E5%88%98%E7%BF%94+%E6%B5%B7%E6%8A%A5&imgrc=d5CPwwQx5PoZmM%3A