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To finish our 296 class, I’d like to end up with an emphasis on customer service! Since many companies are in a perfect competition, they have to train their employees to build a loyal relationship with customers. This is where this factor kicks in!

I’ve always been satisfied with the employees of TDBank. Whenever they come in, they always politely smile at me and ask how I am. Moreover, while doing the transaction, they always try to ask about my day and make a few comments on it. Even though I know it’s part of their job and I’m not particularly touched by it, I think it’s such a great customer service that I can trust on. Also, they always do their best to accommodate my needs and go beyond that. One employee even offered me a visacard while I was waiting for another transaction even though I never asked for it. I always got convinced easily if things are easy and simple. So I got hooked by that right away!

That’s my day with TDBank in 15 minutes. Everything got done quickly and nicely, thanks to the well-trained employees!

So we have been talking a lot about the Promotion Strategy these past few weeks in 296 Class. It reminds me of the movie “The Joneses” that I watched on the airplane on the way back home this summer.

So The Joneses is a movie about this family moving to the new neighborhood. They were portraited as a model family that everyone admires. Whatever these members use are all new products that everyone wishes to have. For example, the husband would have a collection of golf sticks and keeps on playing golf with other neighbors. The wife would show off her kitchen and hair products to all the housewives around. The daughter would fashionably show up in class with all the make-up kits and get surrounded by other jealous girls. The son would automatically become a hawt guy since he owns a flashy convertible car.

In the end of the movie, we realize that it’s not all that! They are actually agents pretending to be a perfect family so they could be a good “reference group” for the neighborhood. Every week, they has a meeting that shows a report on how much they’ve sold those products to their friends and peers. This is exactly called Personal Selling as what we’ve learned about.

This is an extreme case of marketing, but who knows if it’s gonna happen 10 years from now? Watch out for perfection, cuz you might fall for those reference group’s traps!

I admit that I underestimated the importance of TLog before. After reading thoroughly about the Distribution factor of the 4Ps, I find it very interesting to know about the process of manufacturing the product to delivering it to the customers.

One particular article that caught my attention was about Zara and its successful business. Zara can design the new trend and sell all of its stocks in just a few months. However, I’d say it only conquered European region.

How about North America and Asia? After travelling for 3 months in Europe and seeing Zara everywhere, I realized that Zara in Canada is way too expensive compared to that in Europe. Shipping cost is one unavoidable matter that we have to take into consideration. How should Zara address this problem to make the fashion and price consistent in different regions? Should it give way to franchise solution or build a new factory here? We’ve yet to find….

Getting distracted from 290 and 294 assignments, I decided to blog for Marketing. As I surfed through the blogroll of section 101, I’ve come across a few interesting entries from my classmates. One of which that I found relatively relevant to my experience is Rena Zhou’s blog.

In her blog, she mentioned that the increase of for-profit colleges’ tuition fees is in a positive correlation with the admission of rich international students. These universities specifically target toward high-income, well-rounded kids competing to get a spot there. I have never thought of that before, but private universities in the States actually used a lot of marketing strategies to attract their target market, especially in such perfect competition.

So what kind of marketing strategies have they used? The richer the university is, the more scholarship they give out to students. Despite the high tuition fee, people are still optimistically believing that they might be a scholarship recipient. This is why we have a high demand, and low supply which leads to less than 10% chance of getting admitted every year.

Speaking of pricing strategies, people perceive these private universities as high values, so they wouldn’t mind paying $50,000 plus per year, just to get the brand name “Harvard”, “MIT”, “Stanford”, etc… Look at it as Louis Vuitton, Versace, Dolce & Gabbana… What’s the difference?

Also, universities in general apply two-part pricing to domestic students and international students. As an int student, I have to pay four times higher than other people to get the SAME education. If there wasn’t a high demand from abroad, I doubt that Canadian government would let this unfair pricing strategies happen.

Marketing ISN’T geared toward business solely. It happens anywhere, anytime even to public sector like education!

In order to differentiate yourself from other competitors, you gotta think creatively and make your products stand out in that category!

I’d like to introduce my friend’s business, Bridal Cookies, as an example of differentiated product in Vietnam. While wedding business in Vietnam hasn’t been developed fully compared to Western countries, he has taken his feet wet in this competition by introducing cookies for weddings that offer different shapes, favors, sizes. I’d say this is almost new-to-the-world product that no other strong competitor has successfully introduced before. Bridal Cookies mostly promotes its products via social media channels, such as facebook, twitter, and its own website. This is very convenient for customers because they can just shop online for their favorite cookies and get delivered in a few days.

They have their own youtube channel, and here is one of the videos posted there: