A photo of the founders of Snapchat taken by J. Flores for the New York Times.

In the New York Times article linked here, it is said that Snapchat – infant social media rejects a multibillion-dollar proposal from Facebook.  In today’s social media services, there are rabid races between tech companies like Instagram and Tumblr. Snapchat quickly gain in popularity and attract multiple sky-high takeover offers. One of the most special characters of Snapchat is that photos and picture will disappear after they are viewed which protect people’s privacy.

The reason for this rejection is that the leaders believe they can make more profit in the future. Snapchat has the potential to develop itself further and win a bigger market.  Young managers are much easier to know that the younger generation want and need. They have a clear value proposition. Also, Snapchat takes example by other mature products like Wechat and Line, and the way they operate in the market. However, in the crowded social media market, it is hard to prospect what will happen in the future. For example, Facebook rejected $1 billion takeover from Yahoo and become a hundred-billion company. Groupon rejected $6 billion takeover from Google, on the other hand, and stumbled by roadblocks these years.

Motorola Mobility which is owned by Google is trying to find its position in the smartphone market. The sales in the High-end market is not optimistic due to the fierce competition in the recently years. Motorola decided to change the target group and release the low priced phone, Moto G in the low-end market which costs at least 180$ without a contract.

To be honest,  Motorola faces tough competition in the market. Although it says that Google can organize all the world information and make it universally accessible, Chinese handsets market like Huawei and ZTE also make Android Phones which cost less than Moto G. These manufactures have built a certain consumer loyalty in the market and according to the price they set, it is more reasonable in the low-end market. They have a much clear value proposition than Motorola including the market strategy, targeting group and the device function. Also, they have better shape design. On the other hand, Motorola lose one of the most important markets- China. Although the manager said it would appeal to enough people outside China to be a success, it will face a big limitation in the future sales. This is difficult to make the money back with ads and other aspects. As for me, I am not optimistic about the future performance of Motorola.

a Harvard Business  Blog  link.

This blog describes the importance of brand positioning and value proposition in the customers-centric business. The features and innovations of Brands need to be greatly explained so that consumers will have the interests in the products. For example, Bentley and Audi are labeled by better suspension while better fuel efficiency is best introduced by the Volkswagen, seat and Skoda brands. A brand set-up needs many works. Every product and future innovation plays important roles in the marketing. Not only determining the future direction, but also the crucial factor to win consumer trust.

A trustworthy brand will reduce the consumer’s risks, position the innovations and give them meaning, finally standardize the new product or feature. There is a demand for the company to combine the characters of their products and reflect it into their brands. Some brands uses their very best innovations in every product like Apple which help them fulfill their targets and win a lager market with building the consumer loyalty.

From BloombergBusiness Week link here.

Dropbox has became one of Silicon Valley’s most promising startups which attract more than 200 million users which includes four million business users. Dropbox provides a convenient and efficient way for both individual and business users to do online staff. Like Houston said (Dropbox’s chief executive officer),”People love they can have their work stuff and personal stuff together for the first time.” Compared with TWTR, there are more files saved to Dropbox everyday. Although Dropbox is also facing fierce competition like VMware, Salesforce and Google, Dropbox market is still growing at a dramatic rate.

However, it is difficult to say that Dropbox is a perfect product among the competitions. Many companies are worrying about the protection of personal datas from officers’ computers when employees are using Dropbox. To address this problem, Dropbox introduces a service called Dropbox for Business which gives company IT administrators new security features. According to the new services, we can see that Dropbox is good at meeting the market demand and quicken the paths in innovations. It is more professional and reliable than many other products in the market. Although a lot of businesses haven’t made their decision yet, I believe Dropbox will have a good development prospects in the future.

Di Mu’s blog is related with one of my blogs, which is about the operations of Snapchat. Social media market is facing fierce competition in the market; new entrants have brought new threats to the old media brands like Twitter and Facebook. As new social media products, Snapchat has an excellent performance in the market that is appealing to many young adults and becomes one of the strongest competitors in the social media market.

In Di Mu’s blog, she thought Twitter had got lost in its future development path and suggested that it could take advantage of partners like Apple. I think it is a good advice, which can provide a broader platform for Twitter and give it advantageous conditions to compete with new entrants. However, to some extent, they need better market strategy and new services. Snapchat has time limit function and has second rate of posts behind Twitter due to this device. Twitter needs to appeal to the market demand especially the younger not just modify the displays of other social medias.

Hua Yuming’s comments about deleting Cookies are critical and valuable. According to my individual experience, I think Cookie collection must be banned and people need to raise their privacy consciousness. Cookie collection is illegal to some extent because it just collects individual information without permission. Some media companies can get individual information includes names, telephone numbers and email address from Cookie collection and make nuisance calls. Some individual educational institution can buy the information from some “Cookie” Companies. Netizen will feel unsafe when they are on the websites and especially some business companies recorded is also very important and private.

I think in many countries there is lack of efficient regulation to punish this kind of behavior. Take China as an example, due to the huge population base, it becomes difficult to govern online information. When you come to the Internet Bar and register some online account, it is possible to be theft by other people and lead to financial fraud even the personal safety issues. So this is also a good opportunity for some media companies to provide safer new products that meet the market demand.

In most European countries and North American, car prices will be lower than many Asian countries especially some famous brand auto. Normally, it is not consistent with the  price of the raw materials and labour cost because in China and many other Asian countries, labour cost is much lower than European and North American countries. It is  related to the agreement of WTO, many developed countries has signed agreement about decreasing and eliminating taxes to encourage car manufacture and world trade. So the price of cars in those countries is lower than many Asian countries.

According to Jalopnik， Malaysia has become the world second highest car price which followed by Singapore. The executives of consumer Federation of Malaysia said it was the time to reduce the price especially government has reduced the subsidies in petrol. However, Malaysia government will not consider to reduce the taxes because the price of petrol and management is reasonable. Also, it is difficult to solve the problem immediately because it may lead to the high unemployment in the society and cause more problems in other areas.Of course, by considering  the pollution from using cars , it is also not a good idea to encourage the car consumption. I think China will have potential to become the lowest car price country in the future but there are also many problems. China is used to be the second part of food chain so it is difficult to be totally independent from other countries. To achieve there goals, China need to pay more attention on the quality of their products because China always makes many problems at that stage.

According to the class pre instructors, it refers to some companies that make financial statement fraud like Enron, Worldcom, Tyco and Adelphia. They were all known as the international companies and the leader of their area. During the past years, financial statement fraud is increasing dramatically by many reasons. I think the existence of it have many unavoidable reasons so the responsibility cannot all taken by the company.

Financial statement fraud is harmful in many ways.it will undermines the reliability, quality, transparency, and integrity of the financial reporting process. it will also diminishes the confidence of capital markets and make it less efficient. Overall, it will bring adverse effects on nation’s economic growth and prosperity. However, sometimes it is also related to the government police and some company have heavy tax rates so they can only take this approach. When monopoly and oligopoly companies’ profits indicate dramatic increase in the report, it will attract more attention from the public, then government will take high tax rates to regulate enterprises. However, high tax rate is not a perfect method and it will cause many negative effects like making financial statement fraud, and an inactive factor for companies’ development. So government is devoted to detecting this kind of financial crime but also prevent to be the cause of this event. Although company needs to take most of the responsibility but government also needs to make a good balance and be fair in the business manipulations.

Before taking commerce, I only have a vague sense about brand position and value propositions. I will take it as how to determine the target group and a good name for the brand.However, during this information overload era, consumers will have many approaches to get touch with various branches , so company must do something to help consumers distinguish it  in the market and get into the mind of the consumers.

Take HTC as an example, it is facing the most difficult time and I think one of the important reason is that this company did not find an appropriate position in the phone market which has the most fierce competition. Compared with its past glorious success, many negative news is around with HTC; declining performance, executive defections and many other problems. Although there are many different products designed in HTC but it also indicates another problem that they do not have a clear brand position.it will confuse consumers and make them feel messy. According to the market investigation, many consumers  said that they did not know which one is the most classical one in HTC. In October 2009, HTC has  launched their first worldwide advertisement , the main topic is “Quietly Brilliant” and it strongly pointed out their products is human-centered which usher their peak time in 2010 and 2011. However， Apple and Samsung also made many efforts on brand position and did better than HTC these years. Also, disordered marketing strategy makes HTC now in the bottom of their performance.

Although HTC One now help HTC resize some market but it is also not very optimistic in the future because of the supply chain and the fierce competition. It seems HTC still have a long way to go and from this example ,it helps me deepen the understanding of brand position and its importance.

About social ethics

Actually in China “social responsibilities of business” is always one of the hottest topics among the Medias and in the recent years many substandard food and drinks like milk was exposure. Take Sanlu Group as an example, it is one of the biggest and most popular diary producer in China, but its milk powder caused the Kidney Stone of many infant. At last, about 39965 babies are suffered from the poisonous chemicals called Melamine and this event extremely destroyed the reputation of Sanlu Group and reflects that Chinese enterprises’ social ethics desperately need to raise the ethical standards. This event related to many other companies like Eire and Mengniu Dairy (this guy was advertising in IRON MAN), and many countries in the Europe prohibits the import of dairy products “made in China”.

Social ethics directly affect market value in many aspects, e.g after the milk scandal, consumers may dramatically decrease the quantity of consumption and some of them may consumer the  imported milk powder which may worse the terms of trade in one country. R.Edward Freeman said “each one of the group is important and their interests should go together” but obviously these diary producers did not figure out the interest going into the same direction. It is reflected that social ethics is not attached great importance in these Chinese enterprises, they just pay attention on how many profits they can earn but not consider the consumer benefit.