Monthly Archives: November 2014

Burger King has just opened its first completely beef-free restaurant in New Delhi, India. They feature lamb, chicken and vegetarian food but no beef! I think this is a very big event not only for Burger King, but for all fast-food restaurants. They have removed beef and pork from their menu and created completely unique menus in order to comply with Hindu and Muslim religious practices/beliefs. Burger King is the leader in what I believe will become a new trend worldwide. Soon many other fast food chains will follow suit as it could lead to more revenue for each of these companies because people will be more willing to eat at these restaurants if they adopt their religious beliefs. Burger King has obviously created a new Value Proposition for cities/countries that have a majority of different beliefs compared to North America such as India. They have looked at the pains these consumers might be having such as being against the slaughter of beef and adapted their products and positioned themselves properly in order to appeal to/attract these consumers.

I found Liz Ryan’s blog post about five things you owe your employer and five things you don’t very interesting. She talks about how a lot of working people bring their work home with them as opposed to leaving it at their workplace and about how workers need to learn to set boundaries. This blog post interested me because it relates to my life with my dad always having doing work at home after he has already spent about a 10-hour day in the office as well as having conference calls/phone calls when my family is away on vacation. It seems that his job follows him everywhere and he is constantly being distracted by his work obligations. I think employers and employees in today’s day and age need to establish certain guidelines when it comes to work outside of the office. I believe work should be left in the office and being out of the office is about spending time with family and friends, and doing other activities that interest you. However, a lot of employers are very demanding and sometimes when you are new to the company/workplace you don’t want to challenge your seniors, you want to show them that you are willing to put lots of hours in, even outside the office. It is sort of a catch-22 situation, but I believe being able to establish guidelines with your employer from the start will lead to a positive outcome for both parties.

Mastercard has partnered with a tech company, Bionym, and has recently announced the release of a wristband that is to be used as a credit card. The first thing that came to my mind when I read the title of this article was: “what if you lose the wristband?”, then somebody could have access to your money. However, upon further reading I discovered that it is personalized to each person’s heartbeat and therefore can only be used with the person whose heartbeat is synchronized with the wristband. I am not sure whether I like the idea of this or not. I think it is a very unique product that has taken the ideas of other wristband information trackers such as Fitbit and applied it to a completely new setting and it provides a super easy way to pay. However, I don’t know whether I trust that it wouldn’t work with other people because heartbeats are not unique enough compared to something like a fingerprint. In regards to Porter’s Generic Strategies, this product would apply to the idea of differentiation as there is nothing quite like it (in the sense that it works as a credit card) on the market yet and its target scope is industry wide seeing as a large percent of the population of the world use credit cards, specifically Mastercard.