Hans' Blog

Stanley wrote a blog about how a woman in San Jose received a hefty phone bill that proved to be incorrect later. I agree with Stanley that this is unacceptable for the business as it can directly impact the consumers’ behavior towards the bill and the company. However, this is not the only company that inaccurately charges overly expensive phone bills to consumers. Today, many phone companies have hidden charges that consumers aren’t informed about until they received their phone bill. Companies are being sly in their bill charging methods in order to maximize their own profits, with is ethically unacceptable.  As consumers, we should know what we are being charged for and why we’re being charged.

Luckily, this San Jose changed the bill for the consumer so that she receives the right amount. Some phone companies these days would not accept their incorrect mistakes, leading to a damage in the relationship between the company and the consumer. Not only will this upset consumers, it will also lead to legal issues that the companies will have to face. However, these legal issues usually do not happen because companies often find a way to overcome these complaints and charge extra to the consumers.

This behavior done by phone companies needs to be halted as it is unethically wrong.

Source : Phone Bill Too High

While going through classmates’ blogs, I stumbled upon Hugh’s blog about Best Buy being used as a showroom for Amazon. In my opinion, it is true that many consumers are looking into online purchases rather than going into stores to purchase their items. Personally, what I do is that I would go into stores to have a first hand view of the product that I am interested, and then buy it online because of the cheaper price.  This process is not beneficial for stores such as Best Buy because consumers are using the stores as like a showroom for their purchases online later on. I agree with Best Buy’s plan to match any price that is online. Not only will this regain their customers  it will be providing competition for online retailers. Consumers will not purchase online anymore because the prices will be the same in store compared to online. Moreover, by purchasing at the stores, consumers will be able to obtain their product immediately.

The only problem with this plan is that Best Buy will need a list of online competitors that it will match prices with. This is because certain online retailers will be able to offer prices that are so low that Best Buy would lose money if they compete with them. There should be a list of retailers that Best Buy will compete with based on the validity of the prices that the online retailers are selling their products at. With this, Best Buy will have no problem competing and regaining their customers.

A little more than half a year ago, the Conservative Party of Canada officially announced the discontinuation of the pennies. This was done because of the fact that the Canadian government is losing more than producing money than earning.  Through the external blog post, Pennies be Gone,  the blogger agreed with the decision to remove pennies from circulating in Canada. He stated that he would have to spend two dollars to purchase wrappers to insert his extra pennies in order to deposit it in the bank. However, he stated that it costs 200 pennies to purchase those wrappers, a cost that should be unnecessary.

However, with an elimination of pennies creates a problem for consumers and retailers. The new law states that it is necessary to round up or round down to the nearest 5 cents increment. In my opinion, this poses a problem for consumers because consumers may have to pay more when purchasing a product. For example, if the total adds up to $1.13, the consumer will have to pay an extra two cents when rounding up to $1.15. Overtime, the consumer will pay an great amount of extra change for the rounding. Moreover, this poses a problem for retailers, because it will affect cashier balancing for business. If retailers have to round down purchases, they may be short more than $2 at the end of a day of business because of the extra rounding down. Overall, in my opinion, this discontinuation of pennies will create problems in the short term that consumers and retailers will have to try to overcome.

Reference : http://markosun.wordpress.com/2012/03/29/pennies-be-gone/

Throughout the past few months, Samsung and Apple has been participating in a major “phone war” to determine which company with produce the better phone, either the Samsung Galaxy S3 or the IPhone 5. Throughout this battle, each company has been delivering numerous advertisements to the general public to promote their new phones. However, instead of designing advertisements to show the advantages of their phone, Samsung has been designing advertisements to criticize the IPhone 5. For example, Apple has design an advertisement calling IPhone “the next big thing; however, Samsung countered this advertisement by saying that “the next big thing is already here”. Surprisingly, this isn’t the first time that Samsung targeted Apple as they targeted Apple during last years campaign to promote the Samsung Galaxy S2. Last year, Samsung Mobile President Dale Sohn told PCMag, “We’re excited for the opportunity to educate as many consumers as possible about why the Samsung Galaxy S II is the preferred choice for smartphone owners.”.

This battle relates to our class where we learned about relative positioning. I was inspired to do a blog post about this battle after seeing how Pepsi basically did the same thing to Coke by targeting Coke in their advertisements. Through this, we can see that this type to marketing is a common way to target competitors in the same industry.

Reference:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2409794,00.asp

http://au.ibtimes.com/articles/386181/20120920/samsung-galaxy-s3-vs-insults-iphone-5.htm#.UHNNKk3BdCg