Month: March 2011

As Amazon.com is the company which my marketing project is researching about. Amazon.com is one of the largest online retailer in the current market. I personally think that Amazon.com the best because of its variety of products and simple payment. Based on the researches my marketing group did on the STP of Amazon.com, we agreed that college/university students is the major segment that Amazon.com is targeting at. For example, its Kindle, the E-book market by Amazon.com, is apparently targeting to students. Students in college usually worry about their expensive textbooks and are scared away by its crazy weight. With an E-book, students no longer have to carry the thicks and could look at it anytime, anywhere. Furthermore, the old textbooks resell is quite successful on Amazon.com either. As I had a little with my fellows this afternoon, we were talking about how to resell our old textbooks. We all agreed if none of our friends want to buy our textbooks, the first way we came up with is Amazon.com. Amazon.com’s image of textbooks resell has already implanted in most of the students’ mind, everything they want to sell would first goes to Amazon.com. All in all, I believe Amazon.com has a very clear and sharp strategy in targeting in the student market , and also possesses advantages in this segment.

Earlier this week, I read a online marketing blog called Top Rank, and there was a post, Essential Mobile Marketing Resources. According to Lee, “Mobile phone usage goes far beyond making calls and texts. There’s been significant increases in mobile social networking activity, the use of mobile phones to send email and other social/geo apps like Foursquare.” I totally agree with this statement. In the past, the mobile phone market is basically a pure competition model, however, the mobile phone market is entirely different. Almost everyone has a smart phone nowadays, Iphones, Blackberry and etc. I think it changed the whole mobile phone market. Smart phones almost completely replace the market values of other ordinary mobile phones. Some may say that, smart phones is then a new market, it should no longer be in the mobile phone market. But, I think it is just a new line extension which is in its growth. They are still quite a amount of people still using ordinary phones, however, I think the ordinary mobile phones are in their decline stage. There isn’t any ways to make it popular again. For now, I would say ordinary mobile phones are for people who does not talk much on the phone, does not use their mobile phones much and does not pay any attention to the modern technology.

Lee further posted some other mobile marketers’ websites to show the popularity of mobile phones in the modern world and there are always tons and tons of new applications coming out from mobile phones. for example, games in mobile phones is legitimately a superb growing market. I would say most people would check out the games in their mobile phones when they get bored on transportation, in class, at work and even in the bathroom.

Today, I was checking out the course blog and some of my classmates’ blogs. Amongst, I found Beverley Cheng’s blog post about Amazon.com’s supply chain very interesting. She bought a pair of soccer cleats on Amazon.com and is very excited to its arrival. According to Beverley, “Amazons supply chain is so tightly integrated that customers who order an item know almost immediately how long it should take to ship, how many pieces there will be, and any other relevant information. They rely heavily on their technology, and much less on actual human resources to fulfill any inventory issues”, I do totally agree with her, however, the shipping cost is somehow the largest resistance for customers to click the “confirm order” button. It is because loyal customers of Amazon.com are usually looking for something cheap and fast on Amazon, let’s say a Blackberry phone rubber case. A phone case is usually costing 5 bucks and the shipping cost would be around 1-2 bucks. It is almost half of the price of the phone case itself and customers have to wait for a week for its arrival. So customer would think, “why not I just go to a convenience store right the corner so I don’t have to wait and pay shipping fees!” Therefore, I think Amazon.com and other major online retailers in the market should really come up with a better solution to not scare away customer by the shipping costs and attract more business opportunities.

Just now, I was reading Eugene Tan’s blog and I found his latest post is pretty interesting. He talked about Malaysia, the country he was born in. He mentioned that he was told Malaysia has always been a sin country, “girls get raped, men get robbed and killed”. I do agree that every country has a dark side, but we should not judge a country by just a little information. The video is showing some attractive tourism spots in Malaysia. The purpose of making such video is to attract more people from all around the world to visit Malaysia and boost the economy there. I think the government of Malaysia could be exaggerated a little in the video but this is the only way to improve the country’s economy and bring the a better future to the next generation.

Just like Malaysia, I think Mexico has the same situation as well. It is known as one of the countries which  has the highest murder rate in the world. However, there are still thousands of tourists go to Mexico for vacation every year. For example, Cancun is one of most famous city for its beach and sunshine. Some of my friend just went to Cancun to spend their reading week and they came back safely.

I believe most people would have the urge to go to Mexico immediately when they see this picture.

Therefore, I think that countries like Malaysia and Mexico actually did a pretty job to advertisement their beautiful beaches and tourism spot. They should keep it up and try to boost their economy with their strengths.

clean your balls

Today, my friend showed me this video and I found it very funny, so I decide to share it here. This video from Axe is trying to sell a cleaning product for any kind of sports balls. It sounds normal, however, the ladies in the video were playing with the word “balls”. By just listening to the what they say, you might imagine they are talking about something inappropriate. But in fact, they are just demonstrating sports balls cleaning.

The strategy in this commercial is pretty interesting. When people sees this video, they would definitely remember it. nevertheless, parents might complain about the wording, containing unethical content in a public commercial. However, I think it is interesting and effective in arousing people’s attention to Axe.