Month: February 2011

I thought Stephanie Shuen’s blog on All You Can Eat business in Vancouver is interesting. It’s informative, fun and has a taste of personal touch. She mentioned that “6 out of the top 10 buffet restaurants in Vancouver are AYCE Japanese restaurants.” Anyone who has lived in Vancouver for a couple of years will know that we have tons of AYCE Japanese restaurants.

The restaurant industry evidently is a fully matured industry. In Vancouver, all the restaurants are competing over a set number of population. As a result, restaurants fight with one another through intense price wars. Most restaurants, especially that of the same category, charge the same. For example, pho restaurants across the city charge between $6 to 9 per bowl of soup, while AYCE restaurants charge around $20 on a weekend night. In this competitive landscape, the only way for restaurants to survive is to steal each others market share and customers.

The restaurant business also manifest other characteristics of matured business. These companies employ massive promotions over TV and newspaper around the city they operate. What’s really tough about restaurants is that they must compete vigorous to attract customers while maintaining their existing customers. This is difficult because as business grow rapidly, their customer services tend to decline at almost the same rate.

It will take more than just cheaper prices and aggressive promotion to win the hearts of diners!

If you were asked what electric cars do you know, you would probably say Toyota Prius or Nissan Leaf. Well, there is a new kid on the block by the name of Tesla. The Tesla Roster produced by Tesla Motors runs on electricity. Like all other electrical cars, their valuation proposition is zero-emission. However, what’s unique about Tesla is that it breaks the that typical attitude people have on electric cars, such as slow, timid and too green to care about style. Tesla Roadster is fast and stylish.

Tesla Roadster reachs 0 to 100km in 3.7 seconds. To put this into perspective, even the new SL65 sport cars by Mercedes Benz takes 4 seconds to hit the 100km mark. Need proof on its style and design? Well, just look below:

Tesla

The body style resembles that of an elite brand name car–Lotus Elise, which provides certain body parts to Tesla. This mixture of speed, style and sustainability has never been seen before. Thus, the Tesla sits right in the Introduction stage of the Product Life Cycle.

Currently, it does not have a lot of competitors (other than Leaf and Prius) at this point. However, because Tesla is introducing a new concept, it needs to educate people about its products and appeal to the cognitive portion of consumers’ minds.

Photo from treehugger.com

As we can see, it heavily promotes the electrical component of the car and how it achieves Tesla’ theme of sustainability. Through positioning itself as an eco-friendly vehicle in consumer’s minds, Tesla aims to push up demands for its products. However, because it is new, the company needs to “test out” the Roadster in the market first, and cap the demand in case of potential problems. For reason, the price of the vehicle is high as well, in fact it is at an astonishing $125,000. This reminds me of the old days, when PS3 sold for 10x it’s value today and when iPhone cost $1000! Once new entrants enter, the car may be more affordable. In the mean time, I would recommend normal people who has a budget constraint to look at other alternatives to stay sustainable!

On April 20 2010, the largest oil spill in history occurred in the Gulf of Mexico thanks to BP. Due to a weak and flawed safety and risk management, one of BP’s deep sea rigs exploded, sending tremendous amount of oil into the open sea. It’s not too hard imagine how BP’s reputation from a petroleum production powerhouse to one of the most hated companies on the planet overnight.So how has this affect BP’s promotional campaign? Let’s explore.

Image from twistedsifter.com

BP release this promotion ad over a decade ago: Old BP Advertisement. As you can see, this ad focuses on BP’s mass operations and testing of oil in many industries such as automobile, aircraft, undersea and etc. From BP’s boastful campaign, the company seems to live in a Marketing Era. BP suggests that it makes oil for different consumers, and is working hard to satisfying their needs. The company simply produces oil to meet demands of various industries.

However, BP’s strategy has took a different turn after its notorious oil spill: BP’s New Advertisement . Now, BP shifted its gears to focus on Value Marketing of the new era. In the new promotion, BP heavily highlights it’s ability to efforts to move away from “dirty” oil to “clean” energy such as biofuel, natural gas, wind energy and solar energy. Through clean energy, BP wants to appeal to customer who care about the environment and also redeem the reckless oil drilling perception upon the company by adding value to these promotional targets.

Through BP’s example, we can recognize that a company shift its promotional strategy (from sales to marketing to value-based) based not only on current trends from other competitors but also by special events. In this sense, company are flexible and adaptable in their campaigns and will change accordingly and timely!