In this very interesting marketing project, our team – Michael, Silvia, Paige, Leah and me, focused on the athletic brand Lululemon, which was founded in Vancouver. It was a bit of challenge at first since Silver and Michael have never been to the store, needless to say the knowledge of Lululemon’s values or current situation. So we decided to visit the very firs Lululemon store in Kitsilano for experiencing a little more about their excellent customer service, friendly store atmosphere as well as healthy lifestyle values. And we ended up filming the beginning of our video there too, which was very fun and interesting.

Throughout the project process, five of us, from knew little about Lululemon, to realize their SWOT, micro-environment, and to made our own practical recommendations, I really learned a lot, not only on marketing, but also team work, communication, etc. Initially, we just met up once before the assignment due and divided the work into five parts, which ended up some pretty bad marks. Thus, we came to realization that this will not work, it is of great importance to interactive with each team member and exchange ideas from different perspective. We then met up every week to draw out our core ideas of the assignment and complete it after the meeting individually and eventually combined each part together.

Overall, I very enjoyed the process of completing this marketing project with my wonderful team members.

I’ve always had huge interest in social media, so I had some fun reading one of my fellow classmates Linette’s blog (https://blogs.ubc.ca/linetteho/2014/02/28/instagram/). It is true that the success of Instagram has a lot to do with its easy mobile, hashtags, liking and commenting, geotag posts.And other than the ones Linette mentioned in her blog, there are some points I would like to bring up as a active user of Instagram.

Pictures and videos – nowadays colorful and vivid pictures tend to be more attractive and eye-catching than simply texts, not many people are willing to spend more than 1 minute to read others daily status while a lot of them are interested in the ‘looks’ of friends’ daily lives. As we know, Instagram added its new function – short video, which I’m personally really fond of, I can not only record the motion of the everyday moments, but also my friends would be able to hear and feel what I felt at that special moment, needless to say there are various filters that can make your pictures and videos look much more fascinating.

Simple sharing – one of the very important reasons why people like using social media everyday is that they get attention from their friends and people around them, imagine if nobody likes, comments or even knows whatever you post on the social media everyday, then there would not be many people using the social media other than personal diary I guess. Thus, the simple sharing on Instagram enables people to get more attention right away. By just clicking ‘share’, people can easily share their posts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and other social media.

With such success in the virtual world, now Instagram is about to launch its own instant camera, which all the instagram fans are waiting for.

In the recent blog of “Malaysia Airlines Grapples With HM370 Crisis Management” from brandchannel. com, MA has removed all promotional material from its social pages, with its Facebook and Twitter outposts focusing only on the flight as the news continues to break. Not surprisingly, company’s reaction after such sensational incidents happened is extremely important in terms of both the brand image and company’s reputation.

“Malaysia Airlines has so far has demonstrated its professionalism in handling this crisis-like situation. Their burden remains heavy, but they can at least take comfort that CEO Ahmad Jauhari Yahya and his team know what they are doing.”

The blog believes the airline is doing a good job employing the “Triple R of crisis communications: Regret, Reason and Remedy.” Earlier after the incident took place, MA stated that “As of now, we have 115 family members in Kuala Lumpur and they are taken care of by 72 different caregivers. At least one caregiver is assigned to each family together with a Mandarin translator for the families from China. Equal amount of initial financial assistance are being given out to all families of passengers and crew over and above their basic needs. This amount is extended to families of all crew and passengers in Malaysia as well those from other nations. We regret and empathise with the families and we will do whatever we can to ease their burden. We are as anxious as the families to know the status of their loved ones.”

Without any doubt, the threat to the organization is tremendous as shares of MA were sharply lower by as much as 20% after the flight went missing. As a result, crisis management, that is a process by which an organization deals with a major event that threatens to harm the organization, its stakeholders, or the general public seems particularly crucial.

Next, MA turned all its digital assets to unraveling the pieces of the puzzle while pointing on social to their Dark Site – a ‘dormant’ site activated in times of crisis for updates. “Such coordination and activation within hours of the incident suggests a company that takes crisis management seriously and has drilled its employees to be able to carry out such tasks under the pressure of public scrutiny,” concludes Unspun.

In the increasingly competitive modern society in china, more and more people tend to dedicate time and energy to the success of their study and career instead of pursuing the happiness of personal life. And when they somehow get to realize the significance of personal and family life, they just can’t wait for finding a girlfriend/boyfriend. Under such demand of starting a relationship or even marriage, the Chinese TV show if you are the one was born.

Fei Cheng Wu Rao (literally “if not sincere then do not disturb”, known in English as If You Are The One) is a dating show produced by Jiangsu Satellite Television since 2010. Loosely based on the Take Me Out format, If You Are The One has been a ratings success in China and episodes are also widely distributed online as it’s not only extremely popular in China, but also in other parts of the Chinese-speaking world.

In the show, 24 women stand in an arc, each behind a podium with its light initially on.The women face a single man, who uses two or three video clips to reveal some personal information such as occupation, interests, love history and friends’ opinions. During each video clip, each of the women decides whether or not he is still “date-worthy” in her opinion by keeping her light on or turning it off. The contestants, psychologists and host frequently exchange banter with each other when video clips aren’t being shown.If a girl doesn’t like the man, she will turn her light off.

Apparently, the show has been much more popular than the original Take Me Out. The show positions itself as social-life type of service show rather than game dating show, which may attract more participants and to many audiences the show is not only about seeing other people looking for girlfriends/boyfriends, but focus more on how everybody is discussing some heated social topics, whether it’s about relationship or family. So value-added marketing can be demonstrated pretty well here. 

As I opened up the Facebook page again yesterday, I noticed that it’s the 10th anniversary of Facebook. And for celebrating it, they served up millions of personalized “look back” videos which displayed some of the users’ most-liked statuses and photos and helped capture some most important events over the time of their lives on this social media networks. Without any hesitation, I made one myself and was pretty impressed by how Facebook has recorded so many fascinating moments over the recent years of my life and how personalized the video was to get connected with every user who got the chance to make one.

The revolution of computer technology and social media has changed the way we shop and the way we surf the web as well as  how the marketers target its customers and win over other competitors. One strategy marketers are gradually focusing on is to design the personalized experience for web users as so that users’ would feel more connection with the brand and have more motives to become loyal customers.

Remember last time you was surfing at Amazon and you didn’t plan to buy anything but kill some spare time. Surprisingly, you accidentally noticed there was a “recommended items” column where listed all the things you weren’t planning to purchase but interested in for a while. and the next minute you found yourself keep browsing all the recommended items and having the strong intention to actually purchase some of them. And on another ordinary day of your work, you received an email from a travel agency telling you that there is Valentine-themed 3-day trip to Miami during the upcoming long weekend. Surprising enough again, you were thinking about the Valentine present given to your girlfriend and started considering this romantic trip as a wonderful surprise for her. Yes, you were already experiencing the personalized web surfing and online shopping.

Without taking too long, I believe that we will see all the major web platforms will be applying personalized technology system into practice.