WingChun Cheung Jerry's Blog

Last month I had a long talk with my friend Chow who is now working in Arizona, the United States. We have met since junior high school, and he went studying in Arizona since 2006. He has been keeping successful no matter in studying, voluntary achievement and now working in a company. Now he will be sent to his company’s China branch because of his working visa’s issue but at the same time his company don’t want to lose him. Basically now he is having the life that exactly I want to have. Therefore except he is my friend, he is also a target that tells me how well I am supposed to be.

Since I am transferred to UBC from College, I sort of lost my self confidence because my surroundings are full of genius and textbook terminators. Say smart, genius are better than me; say hard-working, the terminators are better than me. Sometimes I don’t know what to do to have a good grade, to do something remarkable, to graduate, and to eventually find a good job in Canada. As a result, I phoned him by skype last month, and we chatted for more than an hour. As we all know, resume is essential, but what he told me was that sometimes you had no need to exactly follow the format of writing resume if you felt uncomfortable doing that. Place the order for your experience by valuable order. For example, if you are a finance student, and you are applying for an investment bank, then you should include more details of what you learnt in specific courses like Comm370 Business finance because they are the most valuable thing in your resume for investment banks. Also remember to write more professional keywords of finance because some companies may scan your resume; if the number of professional keywords are under what they require, they don’t even write your resume, and of course, give you a chance to interview. However, after you are successfully hired by an investment bank, then you should replace the order that put your working experience in the investment bank in the top and includes more details in that.

He have been hired by 6 companies including UPS; however, because of his working visa issue, he works for the last company. Also I am not very skillful talking to local canadian students, and I asked him how he speaks in the US. He taught me that don’t speak too fast even though you are in nervous because you have accent, and your primary objective is to let other people understand what you are saying. He has a special way speaking in this company’s conference: speak with points; don’t try to say something which is unorganized and senseless. On the other hand, of course, it doesn’t matte in casual talks.

Finally, he told me that, in fact, he didn’t think much all the way through about his achievements, and he just did anything made his journey of study aboard worth, so he told he that don’t worry too much about my study and my future; always keep myself above pressure and keep my mind nature, then I’ll have all the ability to overcome any troubles in Canada. Thank him very much; I always learn stuff from him.

I found some funny advertising and ads from the internet; some of them is very good in representing Guerrilla Marketing. Enjoy!

This one is awesome! The picture fully used the ship’s design.

My uncle is absolutely welcomed to sit at that spot to get back his “youth”.

Ikea bus stop. Waiting buses on that couch is a pleasure if on one is sitting on there.

This one is my favorite. I think most drivers may slow down and see what’s going on~!

Expect it is funny, they also use co-marketing with Starbucks and Extra!

Referring back to Comm296 101 student Sissi Chen\’s Blog, she has a post When Should a Company Be Funny in Marketing that described that there are 7 times when making jokes and using humor is possible or even necessary. For instance, “3. When everyone is being serious.”, it could be appropriate to give a casual joke to reduce the pressure of the atmosphere. (An Indian-accent English speaker is perfect for that moment because most of the time they can make people laugh by their own voice without any jokes; more serious of their attitude, more funny the outcome is.) Also, “5.When your material is drop dead dull.” is useful too. Some people may cram all the contents that they want to say in their power point presentation, but it’s absolutely wrong because most audiences won’t have enough time, concentration and motive to read all the small tiny words in the power point, so why don’t we just make some jokes and get the audiences’ attention?

According to my personal work and life experience, Asian companies lack the humor no matter dealing with companies’ internal control or public communication. Funny and humorous commercials and products are always loved by the society because they attract customers’ attention, sell the benefits and also provide a few seconds of entertainment to the audiences. Also the comfortable working atmosphere can absolutely reduce employee’s working pressure to provide them more space to think, to work carefully and eliminate the chance of making mistakes. However, working is tense in Asia no matter in Hong Kong, China or Taiwan….Japan is better; I don’t know much about the culture of Japanese companies’ internal operation, but at least they do lots of interesting advertising.

What I want to say is that increasing the employee’s working working efficiency and their margin working capacity is far more important than their working hours to increase companies’ production. Staying in the companies at 9, 10p.m doesn’t mean the employee would contribute the same as their daytime. For employers I know it sounds more worth if you hire an employee that be paid the same salary but work for more hours, but employee’s creativity is important too! don’t assume it doesn’t existed just because they are invisible. Humor is a kind of creativity, and that’s why western workers are more humorous than eastern workers. We need ideas! We need innovations!! not working robots!!!!’

Once a year, Christmas is coming!!! It ususally be one of the most important and “annoying” moment for considering which gifts I should buy to who. I wasn’t born in a western family so I don’t like enough cultural knowledge of buying and giving Christmas presents, and i guess there are lots of people who are the same as me. Question: What should I buy?

For suppliers and producers it’s also a serious issue for every year. They have to keep inventing new products amd launching new, attractive marketing plans to the customers in order to sell more. I assume the ideas of designing and developing is not unlimited for companies, so hwo can they keep releaseing new products every year to appreciate the customers continously?

The following two pictures answered my questions. This pictures shows the new concept of M & M’s. you can print everything you want on the M & M’s chocolate beans, your lover’s face, a symbol, anything that is meaningful to the gift receiver, or just simply “I love you.”

you might say, “this kind of customization has already existed for a long time! Apple does this, Sony does this!” yes you are right. When you order the some Apple products, you can upload your sentence then the company is going to print the sentence on the electric product you ordered. What is the difference between what Apple and M & M’s are currently doing for the mass customization for the products?

First, the price of products themselves are different. Imagine you want to buy an iPad to your best friend, and it costs $549 before tax; for the majority of students who have low income, this kind of action only exists in their imagination. (I always imagine someone can give me an iPad in the Christmas!) For giving chocolate beans it would be far more affordable to be a Christmas present. If everybody is buying the same, the gift would be less unique, wouldn’t it? It is how mass customization works to provide specialness.

Second, the chance of products’ perceived value to the customers is different. For the iPad or the latest Macbook Air, even thoug h their size is small, the customization part would only takes a very small part or the overall product and the perceived value. It means no matter you add the sentance on the iPad or not, it won’t change the perception of the product a lot. However, the facial expression, funny symbols or sentance almost chance the overall appearance of each M & M’s!! You are designing your own M & M’s and it only belongs to you and your best friends or lovers. Under the fact that M & M’s isn’t related to a word “expensive” at all, your unique design of the M & M’s doubles, triples or even ten times the perceived value of the chocolate beans.

For the department of product design of M & M’s, it’s also a good news. Instead of lockign all the designing team in the conference room, doing brainstorming again and again, now they only need to accept their customers’ design and do exactly the same as they want. (Even though they might get laid off eventually because they become less important to the company….)

Refering back to one comm296 student Steven Xie\’s Blog of Speed of Fashion_Zara, Steven mainly talked about one characteristic of Zara which their high speed of switching clothing and trend of their retail stores. Indeed, Zara is really successful in doing this to create an overall higher value of their products from the latest fashion and trend they have. Also, they have a high turnover of the goods which required an accurancy in supply chain management and business infromation collection. No wonder why last time my girlfriend wanted to buy a dress in Zara, and after one night of consideration, she couldn’t find the dress anymore.

To talk about creating value of products and companies, socialists always focus on the issue of commodity fetishism. Commodity fetishism is that companies use whole bunch of advestising, packaging, communicating skills, and even the decoration of the stores to provide their customers a valuable image and high value of their products; at the same time, let them forget the cost and the quality of the products and the working situation of the production workers. For example, Zara changes their series of clothing really fast to fulfill their customers’ wants, but the providing products with best quality may not be their mainly concern. According to my friend and my experience, the “life expectancy” of Zara’s products usually is lower than the other companies’ products which have the similar price level such as Tommy Hilfiger’s and Banana Republic’s. However, for fashion pursuers they may not really care about the quality of what they buy based on the fact that they won’t wear a same cloth lots of time; wears differently everyone is the key. Also, so far there is no evidence that Zara is using sweatshops for their production, their employees working in their retail stores did complain about the working conditions in retail stores (in Hong Kong for example). Also I found a news Stop Unfashionable Conduct at Zara which says the same situation in Montreal.

There is nothing right or wrong; commodity fetishism is also a trend of doing business nowadays.

Here is an interesting ads I found when I took Skytrain. It’s an ads from a rental company, and the interesting thing of course is the image of the landlord and the tagline “Kiss your landlord goodbye”.

When I see this ads, what came to my mind is that this company did a good job in positioning! This ads clearly shows that you don’t have to endure your terrible landlord, just contact our rental office and get an apartment with a low rental payment each month! It is really touching with relatively young people (may be students) living without families and love freedom such as me, and that’s what the company have targeted to. The potential customers under this segment like freedom and self-decision making, but they may not have enough income to live without parents, so the second tagline”New homes starting at $551/month” perfectly fits their needs and wants. (My apartment, 1 living room and 1 bedroom, costs $1000 rent per month; I really don’t know how can $551 come from!)

Last time I received an e-mail from my previous company that required me to delete the post related to the company because of the disclose of company information. I’m disappointed, but I still deleted the post and all related pictures immediately; I lost my motivation keep writing the blog every week for a couple days, but I promise I will update the blog and get it back to the track. I hope it won’t deeply deduct my grade of the marketing blog, thanks!

I just read a post of Canadian Marketing Blog, the title is Boomers Should Support More Recent Music from Lina Ko. In the article, Ko indicated that the baby boomers are still the biggest group of customers of North America demographically (our Marketing textbook says the same too), and their taste of music directly affects the younger generations’ taste of music too. Therefore, baby boomers should listen more latest songs to prove the music innovations.

I have the same feeling with that even though I wasn’t born in North America. When I was young I listened to what my parents listed, liked what they liked naturally, usually are pop songs which were more soft, tender and slow, love songs so to speak. (just like baby boomers always like Rock and Roil, from the textbook also.) Now I clearly see the great divergence of music development and innovation between eastern and western cultures. Last week when I went HMV to kill time, most albums displayed at most observable spots are rap, and fast songs (Lady Gaga again…) Although baby boomer era’s songs are still popular, I can see the trend of music is changing; on the other hand, the modern generation can download songs and albums without any trouble, so they don’t have a constant taste of what kind of music they keep listening, or music only become a tool of isolating noise on the bus or skytrain anyway. (Lady Gaga is very talented, but from my point of view, the ultimate reason of her popularity is her specialty of clothing.)

On the other hand, Hong Kong’s marketers in music industry are more conservative. Nowadays the most popular songs in Hong Kong are still love pops, and the only difference is that the present singers don’t know how to sing comparing with the last two decades’ singers. We do have rapers, rock bands in our music industry, but the more successful one are: rap with pop elements, rock with pop elements, and the others are not very popular. One reason is that we are more likely to stick with old stuff instead of accepting new stuff. (In dealing with Macroenvironment, should I classify it as Social of Cultural factor?) Other reason is the Karaoke culture in Hong Kong is too strong, so we always say Hongkongers are very busy and don’t have time to do any exercises because they have to go shopping, see movies, dining, dating and karaoke. CD albums, concerts and Karaoke definitely is a product line in which CD albums have the smallest importance because of the illegal downloading in China and Hong Kong are non-stoppable. Also when teens go to Karaoke, they tend to choose easier songs to avoid freezing their friends right? To conclude, I don’t see any big innovation in that music industry.

Businessmen always have many ways to make money; they can keep doing the same thing until a competitor arrive or all of their customers get bored. Also they can develop market segments and “grow” it, let it bigger and more profitable. How they choose, their call.

Noticed that this is not a blog for promotion; it is just a advertisement just can successfully attract my attention. Last week I saw the advertisement of Christmas Market at the UBC bus loop, and also my destination bus stop.

I heard”oh this guy is taking a picture to the bus~” from a girl behind me when I took the shot. What’s that mean?

I live in Joyce by the way.

This ads remind me the promotion strategies of goods and service of Marketing. First I think most of us realize that Translink is always one of the most popular advertising “tools” in Vancouver; in fact, many of the public transportations are. For example the banners on the buses is like a moving object that more attractive for your sight; even though you may not have quite interest to the content of the ads, you may still have a look. Also, most of the passengers taking buses or Skytrains are quite boring in fact, so a visual ads would be more effective at that time.

And then the second thing inspires me is the design of the ads. Later the promotion strategy will be covered in the lectures, so I may pay more attention on that part. When ad is just an image, the aim of the ads must have to be very clear, shows the content that you want your potential customers know, no more and no less. In this case, only the product “37th Christmas Market”, date “November 17-21”, and Location “Vancouver Convention Centre West” are shown to make sure customers will be there on time. However, what is the exact details about the market?  how many retailers will be there? How much is the ticket? Keeping some secrets and imagination space to the customers is a good strategy too; makes me wonder and go to find what’s really going on there. At last, colourfulness is a powerful tool in advertising design because humans naturally are more sensational to colourful stuff, and we usually build up our memory based on colours more than letters. Unless the ads have to be very stylish, otherwise usually it won’t be just black and white.

Every brand has their own marketing positions and their loyal customers, so one night i asked myself “is it always a good way if a company explore a new market with using the same brand?”

Let me provide an example. Toyota, as we all know, is one of the biggest car manufacturers in the world. After Toyota has achieved a huge enough success in the global market of civil vehicles, they started to think “we are so successful in making cars, we have advanced technology and employees; why don’t we develop a new product line producing luxurious cars and attack the European and American markets?” Instead of using the same brand “Toyota”, they create a new brand “Lexus”. Lexus and later on Acura created by Honda and Infiniti created by Nissan have a great success in the market of luxurious cars. Before I came to Canada, I had no interests to understand cars. When I first came to Canada, I thought Lexus was an European brand of cars, and I didn’t even heard about Acura and Infiniti.

Brand is a representation of the company and of the product. Representation becomes a feature, feature becomes an idea, and idea becomes the dominant ideology from a society. Once the ideology is planted in people, it is not easy to remove and change. Toyota is a brand of course, and it represents affordable cars, family cars, user-friendly cars…etc. If Toyota produces luxurious cars and sells to Europe and North America, first it’s no easy to convince customers in short term that they can produce fast, luxurious and safe cars too. Second instead of choosing Japanese car brands, some drivers always prefer European cars. (Nationalism?)

On the other hand, one of the other best car manufacturers, Porsche, goes to the other way. Before, their sport cars always represented super fast, super slim and super expensive. They were loved by drivers and car lovers because Porsche cars were always “Isolating Mother-in-Law” type. (Two seats, driver and girlfriend only)

Cayman S: my favourite.

However, instead of just focusing on sport cars, Porsche obviously has aggression to develop new markets. First of all is the Cayenne series:

This guy doesn’t be slim anymore~ Even though the speed, acceleration and horse power is still high, Cayenne is more like a SUV. Cayenne is ok overall, but it doesn’t seem very luxurious to me even though it’s Porsche. The first time I saw Cayenne, I thought “is Porsche down grading himself?”  It’s ok to develop new markets, but it’s little bit weird to combine Porsche and SUV. Why don’t the company create a new brand?

Here is the disaster. Panamera series is the latest series published by Porsche last year; it’s also the first RV product line of Porsche. This car has all features as a RV, but it is common, in fact too common for a Porsche car.

Porsche doesn’t have large market shares like Toyota, doesn’t have huge capital and factory like Benz and BMW, but Porsche is still one of the most famous brands in the world because Porsche is a top expert in producing luxurious sport cars; it’s how they maintain the brand’s reputation and brand loyalty. Now they may be finding a way to increase the company’s profit, and selling more different types of cars is a good idea. The effectiveness of the brand “Porsche” is strong; that’s why they keep using the same brand in different product lines. However, the dominant ideology “Porsche = fancy sport cars” works so well in this few decades, and it’s hard to change. Do the customers like a Porsche RV? I do not know. And what will Porsche become in long term? What is Porsche’s next marketing strategy? I want to know.