Linking Thoughts

The first impression that came into my mind when I saw that packaging of yogurt with a picture of a bull against a dark red and black background on Benji’s Post made me laugh. I thought, “Who in the world would choose that over more conventionally white-packaged yogurts with little pictures of fruits on them?”

However, in the recent years, there is an emerging market for low-carb, high-protein products, especially for people trying to losing weight. The idea of seeing quick weight loss results introduced by Atkin’s low-carb diet has had many women and men following this new weight loss regime.

Dr.Atkins’ book on losing weight

This new series of “manly groceries”, as Benji puts it, taps into a completely new customer segment that would be targeting more towards young adults and middle-aged women and men, and not so much families. I believe that the product placement for these products would not actually be on store shelves right next to the normal yogurts, where moms and dads will go look for yogurt for the whole family, but instead in the health and body supplements aisle, next to protein shakes, protein bars and diet supplements.

I’m starting to see more potential in edgier and more hardcore packaging for every day products to market toward young adults and middle-aged men and women as customers in this age group are becoming more and more obsessive about their looks and appearances.

When I saw Kella’s post on Women for Women’s Healthcare fundraiser to raise money on women’s health care, I immediately fell in love with the idea.

One of the most important aspects about running any sort of business or fundraising event is having fun while being able to apply business skills. In this context, the luncheon allowed women to come to together to empower each other and do something enjoyable while helping others. Essentially, the women are not simply there for lunch, but for the experience that this lunch will provide- networking, socialization and entertainment.

A lot of businesses today also differentiate themselves by being creative and selling customers an “experience”, rather than just the product. An example of this is Seattle’s Pike Place Fish market, who incorporates demonstrations, jokes and entertainment while selling fish to customers. This is especially effective when the product or service that a company sells is quite ubiquitous and the product itself is not differentiable from its competitors.

In the case of the luncheon, customers can choose to go to any other place to be able to find lunch, but they chose to go to the women’s health care luncheon because there will be people who share similar interests, an uplifting and festive setting and a fantastic cause. Every business that is started or running should focus on using the idea of “selling an experience” as a differentiation strategy. If customers like the experience they receive, they will keep coming back to the brand for sure.

Seattle’s Pike Place Fish Market – Throwing Fish

Yahoo takes a big step in their human resource management as managers are now asked to rank employees on a bell curve and lay off the lowest-scoring employees.

Bell curve ranking methods are an extremely unfavorable way of measuring employee performance because these ratings is quite subjective. This curving method also risks the danger of demotivating intrinsic motivators, which are the strongest motivators for workplace efficacy and efficiency, and here’s why: A bell curve averages out all the people in the middle, highlighting the highest-scoring and the lowest-scoring performers. This means that although everyone in the middle might be doing a good job and showing great work ethic, their bell curved position only tells them that they are mediocre at their jobs.

A fair and equitable method of measurement would be one that focuses on encouragement and praise rather than fear and punishment. The human resources department of a company succeeds when employees want to do extra tasks outside of their job descriptions to impress and benefit the company, referred to as organizational citizenship behavior.

However, if it was so easy for companies to encourage both rigorous innovation and competition yet create a stress-free environment for employees to relax at work, then human resource issues would not exist. As my organization behavior professor Tracey Gurton says, Common sense is not always Common Action. I think the key to encouraging employee performance would not be trying to quantify their work but to have managers take time to consistently review and recognize good performance. In this way, employees will keep repeating the things they are doing well in and take the company to where it needs to be in the next five years.

Importance of Intrinsic Rewards by Daniel Pink

Over the past several years, sustainability and corporate responsibility in business industries has been a hot topic amongst companies. Company executives not only have to focus on the bottom line, but also on making sure their companies are focusing on social, environmental and economical issues as well.

Image source: wikimedia

A dilemma in switching to fuel sustainability for companies is the increase in costs, in which producing clean and efficient fuel-energy cells is costing more than double the prices of natural-gas energy ($0.14 per kilowatt versus $0.06 per kilowatt). While it seems to be such a clean, simple solution to the emission of pollution and natural gas shortage, fuel cell companies struggle to make a profit due to high production costs. There may be a turning point for the first time in this industry by FuelCell Energy, who is targeting large companies and focused on lowering fuel cell production costs by increasing the amount of production. If this company becomes successful and profitable, then it will create a turning point for other companies as it becomes less expensive to be environmentally responsible.

Large corporations are a good customer segment to target in the fuel cell industries because they can more easily incur these higher costs and they are also the companies that tend to use the most energy. In addition, as the Shared Values reading suggests, companies “must reconnect company success with social progress”. This means that companies not only have to focus on profitability but also how to create a sustainable environment for the business to thrive in, in the future. From a marketing perspective, companies can leverage this as a marketing tactic in differentiation strategy between the company and other top industry competitors because many consumers don’t mind paying slightly more than average prices for a product that is made organically and sustainably.

Jetpacks have always been a childhood fantasy of mine, but now it’s finally coming to life! Created by an 13-employee company in Christchurch, New Zealand, the innovation of a real jetpack actually coming to life will excite many people as well, including Forbes blogger, Matthew Stibb.

Many very cool business startups fail because despite being very new and creative, it might be better for them to stay a childhood fantasy, because the products will only appeal to an extremely niche market. This is why the lean startup can offer effective impartial advice to entrepreneurs and new businesses. Instead of getting caught up in creativity and coolness of the idea and just going for it, the lean startup asks, “should this product be made?” instead of “can it be made?”. It answers whether consumers actually find this to be a practical product or not.

Image credit: Lean Startup Methodology

I agree that the idea of having a jetpack is awesome, but I don’t quite see how I could incorporate the use of a jet pack in my everyday life to make it more safe and convenient. I don’t want to rule out the possibility that someday students will jetpack to school instead of biking. However, that would be tens of years down the road and today, I just don’t see the value of starting a company that makes and sells jetpacks.

Jet Pack Flight Demonstration:

With the growing amount of competition in the Chinese fast-food industry, Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) is is struggling to keep its competitive edge. Fried chicken can easily be found at the nearby street stand in China, but what keeps the Chinese coming back for KFC is the fact that it’s a Western fast food chain. Therefore, if KFC has had such huge success in accessing the minds of Chinese consumers, what is causing its decline in sales over the past four quarters? Part of the trouble for KFC now is the entrance of other Western fast food chains, such as Pizza Hut and Chinese fast food brands as well, Dicos and Hua Lai Shi. In response to the competition, KFC started offering Chinese dishes such as chili black fungus and fishball soup. However, this defeats the purpose of why customers even visit KFC in the first place- to get a foreign and differentiated experience.

image credit: china.org

Another eminent issue is the discovery of KFC using chicken that had been fed with unacceptably excessive amounts of antibiotics to increase growth rates. Since the authenticity of many Chinese products is already questionable, such as revelations of melamine in baby formula and the use of cardboard to make meat, Customers visit KFC because they trust that American companies will have high levels of sanitation and they would feel more comfortable consuming chicken from a North American company with standards than off a street vendor.

For KFC to stabilize its brand, it’s important that it retains its Westernized experience for consumers and that restaurants maintain quality that’s on par with their American counterparts.

It’s hard to look at a financial scandal without Enron, the energy trading giant, coming to mind. Several years ago, it seemed to be the biggest and most profitable energy company; but this changed overnight, over a large financial scandal. Enron was such a large company with so different many transactions that its executives had the pressure, opportunity and rationalization to create and misrepresent financial statements. There might have been pressure from executives in different departments to persuade each other into misrepresenting financial information because the manipulation and masking of evidence takes more than one person’s efforts. There’s also plenty of opportunity since most powerful executives have been in control of the company for such a long period that they are also the ones that audit and process the financial information. For example, Andersen, the auditor of Enron, has been the auditor since Enron first started, in 1983. Then, the executives may rationalize and start believing that what they are doing is justifiable because they are the ones bringing in the customers and cash flow, and therefore, they deserve the most out of the company’s profitability. It’s very difficult to detect these financial frauds because there’s so much happening at the same time and different people making different cover-ups. Even with an impartial auditor working from an outside company, it would be very difficult to prevent the nature of human greed.

Enron, Ethics and its effects on Capitalism:
The beginning offers a bit of explanation as to what caused the Enron financial scandal.

To achieve its value propositions, which is to guarantee low prices and consumer satisfaction, Walmart excels in its values by creating efficient supply chain management and moving products from suppliers to buyers in a timely manner. However, the steady cutback on employees in early 2013 will seriously undermine the Walmart brand’s promise to its customers. When there aren’t enough people to work in the Walmart stores, inventory sits in the backstock, unable to get to the consumer. This harms society in two ways because the customer doesn’t get what they came for and Walmart’s supply chain flow is disrupted by inventory sitting in the back, creating inventory costs and empty shelf space. Moreover, with a decreased number of employees available to help customers, it will lose customer relationships. In fact, this resulted in Walmart being placed last in the American Consumer Satisfaction Index.

Having enough employees to work in the stores is a critical and essential factor for a discount supercenter like Walmart where it is busy and inventory moves off the shelves quickly. One way to save on costs is to increase employee efficiency by implementing employee achievement programs and upgrading break rooms so that each employee will be more motivated to help more customers and stock shelves faster when they are working. The better Walmart can keep up with its customer relationships, cost structure and value propositions, the more customers it will bring in and the better it will be at attaining a good balance of revenue and expenses.

Blackberry, formerly known as RIM, has been known to be in financial turmoil for a while now. It announced Monday that Fairfax Financial Holdings Inc, who already owns 9.9% of Blackberry, is offering to buy the company for $4.7 billion. One problem that may have led to Blackberry’s downfall may be correlated to the first and only offering of the Playbook tablet.

source: Bay Observer

The tablet initially started selling at $500, but the lack of success in selling inventory forced Blackberry to lower prices to $200, selling the product at a loss for the company. In this case, marketing does not meet accounting at all. Marketing says not enough consumers will buy the product at its initial selling price but accounting shows that the price consumers are willing to purchase at will result in a loss for the company. The features that were built-in to attempt to increase Blackberry users ended up being a flaw and inconvenience to consumers, such as the tablet’s inability to run an email application unless connected a Blackberry Smartphone. The idea of marketing its smartphone and tablet as complementary products failed and as a result, accounting had to deal with the repercussions as well. Sometimes company decisions and consumer preferences don’t align, and in those cases, marketing and accounting do have to face certain trade-offs. Over time, the culmination of these trade-offs have placed Blackberry in the undesirable situation they are in right now: having no other choice but to sell the company.

Twenty-two year old Radio and TV program student, Andy Ferguson, dies in a car accident driving home at 6AM after working a sixteen hour double shift and three overnights prior to the incident for Astral Media at The Bear and Virgin Radio stations, in Alberta.

Source: CBC News

In Ferguson’s case, he was denied his request to not work the last night just before his accident. According to family members, he was threatened with not being awarded his school credits if he did not work that night. Ferguson’s family was unsuccessful in pressing charges because Labor Canada does not recognize unpaid hours.

It is common for employers to want employees to put in much more dedication to their work than employees are willing or physically able to put in. However, I believe company ethics played a big role in causing Ferguson to be overworked. He was not treated equally as any other employee at the radio station and was forced into working more hours than other regular employees. Also, the company failed to address Ferguson’s work/life balance, putting company gains before employee capabilities, resulting in pushing Ferguson beyond his limits.

Unpaid internships aren’t novelties to Canadian management; Fairmont Vancouver recently posted an ad for an unpaid intern to support “food and beverage colleagues and ‘setting the stage’ for a truly memorable meal.” Although “bus boy” is generally an entry-level position, companies are still asking students to intern and provide unpaid work for the the company. This seems very unethical to me because the company knows that they will be receiving extra unpaid help, while the student intern cannot gain much experience towards hotel and restaurant management while busily cleaning tables as opposed to being offered an actual temporary management assistance position, and the company fully understands that.