JunMing's blog

Since I am already a third year student, I pretty much have practiced part of the course, for example, resume and cover letter, networking events, and also information interviews. Although I have done a few interviews and sort of be familiar with the process and what we should notice, I still learn a lot from any additional interviews, no matter it is a real interview or just a simulated interview. It always helps me notice some tiny little things that I previously did not pay attention to, and it is always those tiny little changes that improve my interview skills.

So far as for the Comm 299 interview simulation,there are a few valuable things that I learn and I would share with you guys and also for sure I will keep it as an asset whenever I prepare for an interview in future.

First is to bring a portfolio to an interview. I used to just bring a resume or even nothing to interviews. I never thought of the additional materials I bring to interview will contribute to additional conversation or even increase probability of being hired by interesting the recruiter of you portfolio.

The second part is to ask professional question. I didn’t know how to define what a professional question is and its importance until I studied this course, I was asked if I had any question to ask, I thought it was of none significance so I chose to say no. Professional questions are so useful as it helps delivering an image that you are really interested about the position or the firm.

There are alot more to discover, these are just the two things that quickly pop up to my mind. I hope you guys learn something from this course as well

back then when I went to high school, I was shy, easily nervous, and not so talkative. Although I did very well on my school work, I didn’t make many friends. I started to hate schooling. Then, my headteacher, who noticed my problem, tried to pull me out of the situation by gradually teaching me how to communicate with others effectively.

He told me that there are structure is key to an effective communication, the way you structure your communication is fundamental to how easily it is absorbed and understood by your audience. Every good communication should have these three structural elements: an opening, a body, a closing. In you communication, you must make sure your message is clear and it matches what you want to deliver, as giving a confused message to your audience only ends up with them being confused and your message being ignored. Anyways, there are a plenty ways for you to deliver your message—the trick is to use the right one

An enticement to Mini’s product is its custom design program on the internet, called “you-lificiation”. The customer can customize colors, decorations, hub caps, etc… The goal of Mini is for every car to be unique.  After “you-lifying” your mini, the consumer can track the car online from production to delivery. To continue, Mini promotes itself through booklets at auto shows. Also, its website www.miniUSA.com helps to promote Mini and get the word out across the consumer market.

When advertising Mini, the company turned to less expensive mediums. They used print advertisements and billboards rather than television. By having such a unique company, Mini received priceless media coverage from TV shows, magazines, radio, and internet for free. The publicity that Mini received emphasized the car as safe, reliable, and valuable.

In addition to that,” Mini USA has proposed a race of their Mini Cooper S versus the infamous Porsche 911 Carrera S”(http://trutricks.com/2010/06/viral-marketing-mini-vs-porsche/) so as to remind consumers that, although Mini focus on building up an image as safe, and reliable, it doesn’t mean we give up too much for performance.

Basically the objective of all the pricing options amazon offers is to ensure the price is the lowest that amazon could offer at the time of your purchases. If we evaluate the pricing strategy basing on the five C’s of pricing, we could figure out that how amazon could offer lower prices. Firstly, amazon.com is online retailer. Thus it could get all merchandises from producers at a lower cost. Furthermore, since amazon doesn’t have physical stores, it need not bear in-store operation overhead, amazon “realizes that the only way to satisfy customers and at the same timer make sure that Amazon enjoys the benefits of time and cost efficiency is to maintain its own warehouse. It enables amazon to lower its cost, and therefore provides lower prices to customers.  Also, just same as the goal of distribution strategy that make you products available to consumers whenever and wherever they want it, pricing needs to guarantee the convenience of purchase experience and that is, to make sure we provide whatever payment options that is secured, convenient, and favored by various consumers. Consequently amazon offers multiple payment methods ranging from PayPal to amazon’s gift certificates. Moreover, amazon’s pricing model is more like a high/low pricing, giving the opportunity for everyone around the world to track to lowest price by adding shipping and currency converting service. It also helps to expand their customer base by making the website accessible to people around the world.

It seems to be a phenomenon, culture, and even tradition that people a re more willing to spend their money on holidaysl. Put it in another way, people are more or less saving money for holoday spendings. Tthe reasons behind are not only prices on holiday sales are generally lower, but also comsumers seem to get more satifaction from holiday purchase experience by feeling particular holiday atmosphere. Don’t you feel happier when you receive more presents on Christmas than you expected?

After reading Xue’s blogpost, I find he makes some interesting and important points on Christmas sales. He points out that ” Because of the current economic climate, seasonal products and some non-essential items may require an additional push”(https://blogs.ubc.ca/hanbinxue/2010/11/17/ready-for-christmas-sale/#comment-3) Personally, I think this is so ture because in recent years economic crisises seem to come in a sooner and sooner pace while it take longer and longer for the world to get out of it. People are trying to keep their saving as much as they can so that just in case they would lose their jobs due to economy downturns in future.

Therefore, a good gimmick would push people to spend, and holiday sale it is. The following is some statistics on predition of 2010 christmas sale.

• Christmas sales forecast to hit £68.7 billion, compared to £67.84 billion in 2009, a year-on-year increase of £860 million
• High street sales fell in August and Sept 2010 prompting concern that the important Christmas retail performance may not be as good as hard pressed retailers are expecting as consumer activity slows.
• Over half (53%) of mums are planning to cut back on the cost of Christmas presents this year, looking for better value options and discounted items, whilst 42% plan to buy fewer presents. Christmas and New Year retail sales are expected to represent approx. 25% of total retail sales for 2010 and 50% of all 2010 profits.
• Marks and Spencer are planning to recruit 20,000 workers to cope with the Christmas rush.
• Online spending is expected to reach £11.5 billion this Christmas, thats a 28.8% increase on 2009.
• UK consumers spend more on Christmas than any other European country.
• Shoppers are set to spend just £195 on festive gifts for loved ones, down £37 on last year’s figure. Brits spent a £11.6 billion on gifts for loved ones in 2009.

(http://www.eauk.org/resources/info/statistics/christmas-quotes-surveys-and-statistics.cfm)

Today I read a blog post on “A Marketing Blog by Marketing Journal”,which was about how to build a company’s brand. basically the article is saying, to build our brand, we need to “get more customers or buyers”, rather than “get existing customers to increase their purchase frequency i.e. buy more from you or by increasing customer loyalty”（http://marketingjournal.blogspot.com/）.  I agree that this opinion has sort of long-turn view that we shouldn’t just keep our eyes on our existing customers.  but they are saying, creating new customer sources is more important even though these customers are one-time buyers, who just occationally buy our products and might not purchase it again. I have a little doubt on this point. If we fail to convey our brand to these customers. what’s the point of branding and differentiation at all? They don’t even care if we have a brand or not, they just buy our products for once anyway. Thus, I still think we should put more budget on entrenching loyalty to our existing customers, and base on this base market share, we gradually increase our market share by the word-of mouth from these customers, and of course, our differntiation as well. Personally I think the market share created in this way will be more solid and sturdy than looking for random occational sales.

This week I would like to discuss about Apple again. Do you think Apple’s products are expensive? personally I think so. One of my friends once said,” everything about Apple is expensive, you can buy a computer that has the same setting of a MacBook at a much cheaper price. Apple is selling its own brand”. Yes, it is. I agree so, but the question now is how Apple manage to do this and why consumers are willing to pay additional fee for the brand.

The Apple brand personality is about lifestyle; imagination; liberty regained; innovation; passion; hopes, dreams and aspirations; and power-to-the-people through technology. The Apple brand personality is also about simplicity and the removal of complexity from people’s lives; people-driven product design; and about being a really humanistic company with a heartfelt connection with its customers(http://www.marketingminds.com.au/branding/apple_branding_strategy.html) it means Apple using a value based branding strategy, it tries to perceive what the value of their products mean to their customers, in this way they know how consumers value their products and how to improve their products so as to better fulfill consumers’ needs.

Now Apple’s  branding strategy has paid off and it has overtook Microsoft to be the most valuable technology company in the world.

For a period of time I have been wondering why Macbook Air could occupy a certain percentage of netbook marketshare in spite of its price. It could be partially explained by reasons that  there are a certain amount of apple fans (loyal customers) that love and buy whatever Apple sells and Mac Air does fit some customers’ functional as well as psychological need for a portable laptop. However, when a potential buyer, who is not a typical apple fan, applies performance/cost evaluation on a Mac Air at the time he/she is choosing from alternatives, there would be a low possibility that he/she selects a Mac Air. If the market is small, comparing to Apple’s flagship product Macbook Pro,then why would Apple still put so much efforts in developing the new version of Mac Air? I think I kind of find out one more reason when I look into MacAir’s product life cycle.

after figuring out what product life cycle is, I would rather say mac air’s market is growing than saying its small. At this period, competitors come in, in this case, there are some brands coming up with some super light & thin netbooks that claim themselves Air-Killers, such as Sony Vaio X and Samsung X360. These  products look fantastics @countering against Mac Air, they understand Mac Air’s weaknesses and thereby improves them, for example, most of them provides more than one USB jack, which is what MAC AIR users complaint about. They sound awesome, however, when it comes to price, it turns out that none of them could compete with Mac Air: Mac Air is at a relativly low price among all these high-end notbooks.  Therefore, my understanding is that Mac Air succeed to take the advantage of making the first thinest netbook in the introduction phrase of its product cycle, and now in the growth phrase Apple is able to shift its budget to focus on lowing the cost,and therefore lower price. e.g. the 2010 version of Mac Air sells as cheap as $999, a lot cheaper than its previous version of around $1500.

I am not a typical coffee fan, but I am very interested in studying Starbucks’s success as a high value-added coffee chain. For a long time I have been curious about how Starbucks comes up with its marketing mix, especially the distribution strategy. There are so many starbucks stores in Vancouver, at some places there are even 3 stores at the one interscetion but located at 3 sides, but every store claims they are still making a profit. Moreover, besides tremendous store, Starbucks also enters the market in groceries and supermarket. What I interpret this fact is that Starbucks is using a differentiated targeting stragegy, which bases on the demogeographic and product-related segmentation, to make its products available as well as its brand name entrenched in different market segments, so as to increase its market share in the whole coffee market.  According to this piece of news attatched,  Starbucks is planning to expand growth in retail stores & supermarkets. It is reacting related to its competitors marketing strategies,which is said in the news: “[their] competitors are trying every angle to reach [their] customers.”

 There are some commercials not directly selling a particular product, instead they try to convey the image of the brand to consumers.  This kind of ads are very abstract, but those good ones should be able to attract you from the beginning to the end of commercial and then it would lead you thinking of the brand. 

Here is a commercial of xbox 360 I would like to share. The commercial set the story at metro station, everyone in there is engaged in a gun fight simulation. It is really funny and attracting to potential customers. In my point of view, i think this kind of ads are targeting on those who knows little about the conpany and who are consuming products of its competitors. The ad is trying to get people to have a basic impression of the conpany and show what it strive for. I barely know about xbox 360 except that it is a console, but through the commercial, I get the message that they have the intension that try to simulate gaming scenarios to movie like, or even reality-like, 3-D(but because this ad involves so much violence so I guess this is why it is banned).regardless, the ad is funny and consequently attracting. I would like to add one more feture of successful commercials that I discussed in the earlier post and it is intensity of enjoyment. Ads HAVE TO be funny to catch people’s eyes.