Month: October 2010

As November approaches, it is not only the cold and rain that comes, November also represents International Breast Cancer Week. This past week in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the statue of Christ the Redeemer is lit up bright in pink, a week before the month begins. This statue represents only one of forty different monuments that will support the cause by being “pink” this upcoming week. This is incredible news for the fight against Breast cancer. This incredibly advertised campaign will reach millions, and gives us an example of how important and powerful marketing can be. It had me thinking of different examples that best exemplifies the effects of marketing. Marketing is a process where companies create consumer interest for their products or services. One famous example of very effective marketing and advertising occurs each year during the SuperBowl. Almost 100 million people in North America are subject to several different TV advertisements. These commercials are so effective because of the sheer number of people these commercials broadcast too. Like the monument in Brazil, these commercials are supposed to cater to the biggest possible amount of the public, especially their respective target audience.

The Canadian housing Markey is back on track, sort of.  Remax Canada put out a report claiming that the Markey has “vastly improved”, but still believes that sales will be down for the rest of the year, http://www.bnn.ca/News/2010/10/5/Housing-market-makes-strides.aspx . Some may disagree with the statement released, especially after a terrible summer. For example Vancouver has seen a drop of more than 37% from last September.  Ironically, finance minister, Jim Flaherty, on Monday warned the country of it’s struggling economy, singling out the housing market for being one of the key contributors to this recession.  Although Remax tends to disagree, explaining that of the 19 different markets that they were following in the past year, all of them showed improvements in numbers. So whom should we believe? At this juncture in time, it would be tough to evaluate any change in the market as winter approaches. Typically, winter is the worst season for real estate, and generally maintains the lowest numbers of all the seasons, here in Canada. A good determinant of how the market is going would be to measure sales during the spring and summer seasons to see how the market is in peak season.

The social-networking icon has recently been going through many internal changes. Twitter’s CEO, who’s been Evan Williams for the past two years, has recently stepped down, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11473020. He has been replaced by the current chief operating officer of Twitter, Dick Costolo. Mr. Williams attributes stepping-down to finding more time to research and figure out ways to improve company efficiency and productivity. His intent, according to his own twitter page was to, “meet its potential as a profitable company.” This is a significant and important corporate change, and will effect more than twitter’s 160 million users, including all students in Comm 101. People will ask, how much will Twitter change? Very little. Since Twitter has decided to change CEO’s within the company, the business will go in the same direction as it was when Evan Williams ran things. Furthermore, Mr. Williams is staying around to advise Mr. Costolo, in addition to his position on the board. This is the third different CEO in three years, which raises a few concerns. This is not the case for Twitter, who’s rapid growth allows the company to bring in expertise for such growth.