Finally, we finished the video project, which took all of us several days to do it. During the whole process, everyone pay lot of efforts, and it is quite interesting. We go through the process that we think making a video is easy at first. Then we found that there are many things that we need to think about. At last, we made everything on time. During the whole process, I have learned two parts of experience.

On one hand, this project helps me to have a deeper understanding of marketing. When we prepare the script for the video, we have to write down all marketing mix and 4P for the new segmentation. The most important thing is that we have to convince ourselves that this new segmentation is good. Thus, we have lots of discussion, and everyone shows their own ideas. After that, we can make sure our new segmentation is reasonable. At the same time, I realize that marketing is important for modern companies. A successful companies not only have to produce the products people need, they also make sure that customers can approach their products.

On the other hand, I learn more about the teamwork and the basic procedure of making a video. It sounds easy, but when we try to make it step by step there are many micro steps. We divide our work to each team member so everyone can mainly focus on their own part. We all enjoy this process that we recorded each other, and for some parts we tried many times.

I do enjoy the process of doing this project, and I learned a lot from it.

As we know, there are five main ways of entering an oversea market: export, franchising, strategic alliance, joint venture or direct investment. There are lots of factors, which may influence companies’ choices. For example, how many investment budget the company has, what kind of products the company produces and the strategy position of the new market are quite important aspects that companies should pay lots of attention to.

I agree with Yui’s claim about the Papa John’s in China. In my mind, we can analyze Papa John’s strategy in China by the three aspects we mentioned before. First of all, how many investment budget Papa John’s has. Papa John’s is the third largest pizza restaurant chain in the US with 61 million net income in 2012. As the CEO of Papa John’s said, they target China as one of its main market. Based on the cash flow and strategy, Papa John’s should have enough budget for their expansion in China with different methods like franchising and direct investment. The second one is that what Papa John’s sell. As a pizza restaurant, it provides food for eating in store, take-out and delivery. For this kind of business model, location and effective marketing methods are quite important. However, Papa John’s rent out the authorization right of the brand to another company in Shanghai. In this case, Papa John’s lose control of the selection of the store location, the uniform marketing strategy and core brand value. The worse thing is that the company in Shanghai does not check the ability of franchiser in order to make more money. The result is that more and more stores closed because of operating deficit.

I believe that every measure of entering a global market is useful for specific situations of companies. Thus, companies should analyze its own statements before choosing the method.

In Response to  Hannah Clark Steiman’s blog “Apple’s iWatch Will Need Killer Apps” in the management blog. http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-11-06/apples-iwatch-will-need-killer-apps

As Hanaah talked in his article that many evidences shows that Apple is working on it iWatch which is known as the smart watch. The most obvious one is that Apple applied the copyright of iWatch in many countries.

First of all, I agree with the author’s idea that Apple need some killer Apps for the iWatch. As the iPhone series come to the 7th generation, the smartphone market has been well developed. Apple is forced to introduce cheaper products like iPhone5C in order to compete with companies like Samsung. Apple cannot enjoy the high margin profit again like when it is a pioneer in this industry.

In this case, Apple need some new production which can make them as a pioneer again. The smart watch market is a good choice. Although lots of companies have get into the market already as well as Samsung, the selling performance of these products are not good. These products are only suitable for some electric guys rather than everyone. Smartphone owns most functions of smart watch. That is why the author think iWatch need killer apps which can only be used easily in smart watch.

In the marketing area, this is called the diffusion of innovation. As we know, most of innovations are stopped at the innovators and early adopters stages. As I know, some companies started to develop some smart watch devices years ago. But none of them can reach the majority stage. One of the main reasons is that they can produce interesting things but people do not need it.  The same story happened to iPhone before. Before iPhone, many companies like HTC introduced several touch-screen cellphones, but the selling performance is bad because of the bad user experience.

Thus, I believe that any new products should meet customers’ needs otherwise they maybe cool but useless.