With society becoming more advanced, businesses are looking for a quicker, effective, and cost friendly way to advertise. There has been a successful trend in advertising through Facebook, a social networking site. Based off the Sales & Marketing blog from CanadianBusiness.com, Matt Lundy has blogged about the experimenting of advertising through celebrities with Twitter.

Though celebrity endorsements do tend to make a product more appealing, advertising through Twitter isn’t effective enough. The character limit of tweets restricts the information provided to the target audience. Tweets also don’t offer enough of a visual impact (even when linked photos are provided) to catch attention and gain interest.

Another issue is the confusion that comes along with this method. Intermediary advertising firms like MyLikes, may find celebrities to tweet ads for their clients (businesses). The indirect interaction is problematic because businesses can’t always keep track of their endorsers and cannot ensure that the celebrity chosen is a good match for the company’s image.

In my opinion, the shift towards twitter advertising is more troublesome than it’s worth. The quick and relatively cheap endorsement through tweets are too ineffective to become the next new trend.

For More Info: 

Social Networking Advertising: Trends for 2010

In our current society, people have become increasingly aware of their impact on Mother Nature and have started to look to sustainable products. Rachel Yang’s post about sustainability talks about how corporations have began to include sustainability within their business operations. I agree that companies cannot afford to disregard sustainable practices.

There has been a shifting trend to innovating products/services to reduce emissions. Consumers are now facing a social expectation to become “green” to offset their emission waste and ensure resources for the future.  The customer’s changing demands have pressured companies into altering their operations to maintain sales in the market.

For example, Toyota has taken an entrepreneurial approach by developing the hybrid car, a vehicle with better fuel efficiency reduced pollution effects. Nowadays there is a high demand for the Toyota Prius, a hybrid car, because of a rise in fuel prices and increasing awareness of the effect of gas emissions. The success that Toyota has gained from this sustainable product has opened a new market that’s becoming popular. Other car manufacturers, like Honda and Ford, have entered the market to cash in on the product success but Toyota remains as one of the best hybrid car companies.

For More Info:

Pollution from Car Emissions

Group finds Toyota and Ford hybrids are best

Customers are constantly making judgments based off a product’s brand image. As Kevin Wong mentioned in his post, a customer’s purchasing habit can be influenced via advertisements endorsed by celebrities.  I agree with Kevin’s thoughts that celebrity endorsements add credibility to the original product/service.

To expand on Kevin’s post, I think that a company’s purpose of celebrity endorsements is to brand position in the consumer’s mind and influence a consumer’s behavior by using social and cultural factors. The message being conveyed is that if it’s good enough for a celebrity than it must be good enough for the everyday person. People are frequently looking for affirmation that meets our social standards that modern day society has set. This method also shows effective marketing research where the company has searched for the right celebrity to interact the consumer’s perception. In their case to advertise cleats, which people associate with soccer, it was more effective to use a celebrity like David Beckham rather than someone like Martin Nash. Though both may be great players, Beckham is a better public figure because of the media attention he gets outside of his profession.

For More Info:
Celebrity endorsements: Do they make products more appealing to you?

              With technology continuously changing, companies are forced to constantly come up with innovative ideas to outmatch their competitors. Polyvore, a social shopping website, has pioneered the online shopping experience by bringing together fashionable products on a shopping site, providing style advice, and allowing you to mix and match outfit sets. They showcase the latest styles and trends of communities around the world.

Entrepreneurs of Polyvore have innovated the online shopping experience by providing tools that no other online businesses have. The ability to match your personal outfit and get any style advice is something that no other online shopping site offers. There was a risk in this venture because no other company like this existed so there was no guaranteed customer interest.  However, this innovative business was successful in quickly gaining millions of dollars of income over the span of a few years. They gain their revenue from leading clothing brands, like Nike and Coach, which pay to launch their new products on Polyvore’s site. Part of the success of the website is because it offers a wide variety of products from different brands that you can purchase from a central site.

For More Info:

How Polyvore Became a Trend-Setter in Social Shopping
Ceo Talk: Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, Chief Executive Officer, Polyvore
A Definition of Entrepreneurship

Netflix’s recent spinoff, Qwikster, which separated their mailed DVD’s from their online streaming services, has proven to be unsuccessful. The split of services and hike in prices has driven away about 800,000 American subscribers.

This strategy that Netflix tried to implement was unsuccessful because the price of their services was elastic, meaning that demand was sensitive to price. If they had done market research beforehand, they could have foreseen their customer’s reception to Qwikster. Their brand positioning of this new product failed to match what the market had offered with Netflix; Qwikster’s relation to Netflix is similar to the free-ride trap approach because it introduced a similar product to what was already present.

Netflix has faced over a 25% drop in shares compared to their previous quarter. Investors and stakeholders are losing interest in Netflix because of their inconsistent display of market security over the past few months. The company can face major problems due to the loss of equity and liability funding (like bank loans).

Though Netflix has returned their previous combined services and rates, they are continuing to lose customers; their actions had received such negative publicity, which prompted the loss of trust and loyalty to the company.

For More Info:
Subscribers flee, Netflix shares hit
Under Fire, Netflix Rewinds DVD Plans
Netflix down 40% as subscribers drop
Netflix Stock Quote 

        The new release of the iPhone 4S has broken Apple’s previous record sales of the iPhone 4 model. Day 1 pre-order sales for the iPhone 4S has reached a million, compared to the iPhone 4’s 600,000.

Even though there is a huge market for cellphones, Apple continues to be successful in launching new models. A point of parity with the new iPhone is the app market it provides. In my opinion the iPhone app market is similar enough to the Android market to attract its customers, but it also has points of difference with some exclusive and innovative apps that set itself apart from its competition. With its new “WhatsApp”, it even has customers, like myself, thinking about switching from a blackberry to an iPhone, with BBM rendering useless now.

A different marketing strategy may also contribute to Apple’s success. This time around, Canada and Australia are launch countries, along with Germany, USA, Japan, France, and Britain; with more launch suppliers, the pre-order sales are bound to increase. A marketing opportunity might also be the death of Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, because customers respect Jobs contribution to Apple and want to support his last created project.

For More Info: 
Check out the iPhone 4S
Apple’s iPhone 4S breaks early order record 

Occupy Wall Street is an ongoing set of protests that mainly lobbies against corporate greed, wealth and social inequality, and the corporate influence in political matters. This peaceful protest started at Zuccotti Park in New York City and has inspired several similar protests worldwide.

Corporate companies are spending far too much paying their C.E.O.’s and giving out bonuses to higher command employees for doing jobs that they should already be doing in the first place; if companies cut back on this, they could provide hundreds of starter jobs for their company. This would also improve the company’s reputation by cutting back ridiculous high salaries to those that are already wealthy, and offer it to the unemployed who feel like they’re living in the American Nightmare of debt and unemployment. The government has to work on spending less to bailout big businesses (who end up in struggling situations because of their overpaid C.E.O.’s that make poor) and focus more on their citizens who can’t make ends meet. Citizens are losing their 401(k) pension plans and now have nowhere else to turn to; they’ve been lied to and are now facing the brute end of Capitalism.

For More Info:

What is Occupy Wall Street?
Occupy Wall Street Unofficial Home Page
National Protest Turns Into Mass Arrests
We Are The 99% 

After 11 months of poor management skills, Léo Apotheker was fired from the Hewlett-Packard Company, leaving with $23 million. With the termination of Apotheker, the HP Company is facing the worst share price in the past 5 years. In this day and age, corporate companies are spending way too much on rewarding CEO’s with inadequate performances.

It’s no surprise that stockholders are withdrawing their shares from the company; why would you want to support a company that pays for failure? The company’s uncertainty in their management has caused a chain effect of uncertainty in the rest of their business. Not only has HP lost millions from Apotheker’s payout, but they’ve also lost the trust of their clients, supporters, and their employees. How are clients and supporters supposed to believe in the success of the company when it lacks a proper leader figure? More importantly, how are lower levels of employees supposed to feel when top executives get far better benefits than they do?

For More Info:
Common Sense: Rewarding C.E.O.’s Who Fail
HPQ Stock Quote

As the solemnity of the Euro Crisis continues to gain publicity, the frustrations of the European citizen grows correspondingly. One of the solutions that the Greek government was forced to do,to help pay off their debt, was implement a new property tax; one that leaves Greek citizens upset. One might think that it was the poor government actions that continued to raise the debt, but what most people don’t know is the corruption amongst the Greek citizens.

A third of corrupt companies and citizens have cheated their way out of paying taxes, causing the government’s revenue to go down. If people aren’t paying taxes then how is the government expected to make any money to pay off debt? Greek citizens are upset over the introduction of a new tax when they aren’t even completely paying off their own regular taxes. In my opinion, this property tax could have been avoided, or at least pushed back a few years, if the Greek citizens had complied with the law. Citizens can protest all they want but it was of their own doing that caused this government measure.

For More Info:

Greek PM presses EU leaders for new bailout tranche

Greeks Taking Bribes Thraw Papandreou’s Effort to Solve Crisis

April 20, 2010 marked the largest oil spill ever, creating a worldwide environmental scandal. BP public limited company was responsible for an oil spill that flooded the Gulf of Mexico for three months. An investigation showed that the cause of the oil rig’s explosion, which triggered the oil spill, was due to cost cutback decisions and data misreadings. BP’s mistakes resulted in 11 worker deaths, over 6000 dead birds, and over 1.4 billion barrels of waste.

BP’s current reputation is due to the cause of declining professional ethics of a business. The damaging reputation that BP inherited was not only harmful for the company itself, because of all the negative media publicity, but also for their clients who did not support the practices of the company and had to look elsewhere for a new supplier. This disastrous event also caused many environmental issues ranging from problematic activist groups to stricter drilling procedures and laws for other oil companies. From a business standpoint, the recovery expenses from such an event are massive compared to the cost cutback decisions because a new marketing approach to re-establish a respectable reputation is essential.

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The BP Oil Spill