One topic that always seems to arise when we are having discussions in class know matter the subject is ethics. Whether we are discussing quarterly reports from an accountants perspective, or from that of a VP of Operations and are trying keep a competitive advantage. One area that you don’t often see ethics being involved with is the female underwear industry, Aerie changed this with #aeriereal promoting non photoshopped non air brushed no altered models. Mia and Sukhleen bring up a good point that Aerie modeled their business canvas to ‘one of the most “emerging brands in retail today.’” Aerie took a similar approach to that of Doves “real beauty” campaign, where they focus on natural beauty apposed to fake or photoshopped beauty. This really resonates with people because it’s a lot easier for an everyday person to relate to a someone that is presented as an everyday person.
I then wanted to see if people in a different age group felt similarly or if it was just a college trend. I found a blog post by GypsyBagelhands on reddit to be extremely useful for this (age 30).One thing that she brought up was the selling price, 7 pairs of underwear for $25 which is usually the cost of one pair form a leading brand like Victoria Secret. Another great point that was brought up is that she can order online, which is something that older women seem to be fan of. The reason that this is good is because older women who are busy don’t want to go to the store and try on a bra every time they need to underwear no longer have to do this.
Whats even more interesting but not very surprising is the fact that “Sales went up an astounding 18% year-on-year” and Aerie actually started doing better Victoria Secret in terms of sales. The reason for this is because “Victoria’s Secret needs to stop hiding behind dazzle and dated ’70s concepts such as ‘Angels” and the ‘Fantasy Bra,’ and start having a real conversation with women,” says branding expert and marketing professor at University of Southern California Jeetendr Sehdev. Basically todays generation is moving towards thinking about inner beauty and doesn’t really care about Victoria Secret models and their “Fantasy Bras” as much anymore. What i’m interested in seeing is how companies like Victoria Secret are going to reshape there business model and marketing technique to try and re gain customers that they lost from staying so biased in there marketing techniques.

sources:

Let’s talk about aerie underpants
byu/GypsyBagelhands infemalefashionadvice

COMM101: UNTAMPERED BEAUTY

ww.fastcocreate.com/3025443/this-is-who-we-are-now-why-aerie-stopped-retouching-the-models-in-its-ads
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/aerie-photoshop-sales-growth-2016_us_573d35d6e4b0646cbeec260c
http://www.businessinsider.com/aerie-is-the-hottest-lingerie-company-2015-7

(word count 420)

The Chinese housing market is something that is constantly fluctuating.  Recently though there has been a huge spike in the prices of property value in China as a whole but mostly in the large cities. What i’m sure isn’t a shock to anyone is that all of these houses are very new, but what is interesting is the Chinese builders have been making huge cities and buildings for years and no one has been moving into them. So why now is the Chinese housing market doing so well? This led me to thinking if it had anything to do with Porter’s 5 Forces of Industry Attractiveness. The main force that I thought this was affiliated with is Buyer power, because the buyer can directly affect the housing buy either choosing to buy or to not buy. A large portion of people buying housing in China are actually investors and people that aren’t actual permanent residents of the places they are buying. Another issue with people starting to buy these houses at 66% (the amount that the housing market prices have grown recently) higher values is that they might be borrowing to much from the banks which could cause long term financial issues affecting the market as a whole. The reason for this is if a lot of people buy houses at this increased price not only do they need to borrow more for the houses then they would have to previously. But they also would probably have to deal with higher property taxes as more and more people purchase houses and the demand for the property rises. Which feeds into another one of the 5 demands discussed in class “Barriers to entry” a spike in prices along with a spike in taxes would make it a lot harder for less economically sound people to join the housing market. Not only would these people not have as much money but the banks wouldn’t be able to give the people big enough loans to put a down payment on the houses. Eventually the prices will get so high that market will crash which is what happen in the US in third quarter of 2007 and ended in the end off 2008.

Sources:
http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21708674-severe-imbalance-land-supply-fuels-chinas-wild-property-market-when-bubble
http://www.wsj.com/articles/china-housing-revival-buffers-economy-1463288631
http://uk.businessinsider.com/chinas-housing-market-is-going-nuts-again-2016-9
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-17/there-are-more-signs-that-china-s-property-market-is-cooling-off

(400 words)

There are many interesting ways for one to judge the way that an election is going in terms of how the candidates are doing. You can look at polls or at how many people attended a debate, or with the current election you can look at the value of the Mexican Peso. A recent Economist article did just that and the results are actually very interesting. Since the start of the year the value of the Peso has dropped 12%. One reason for this huge drop in value is due to the success of the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Trumps stance on foreign policy and exchange with Mexico is that he wants to build a large wall, increase taxes on imports, and withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement. Not only would this negatively affect the Mexican economy but there would be affects to the Canadian economy. The question that immediately came into my head was, how do we know Trumps success is in any way linked to Peso? The answer came after the presidential debate on September 26th. Hillary blew Trump out of the water during the debate and the value of the Peso rose 2%. Of course the US election is not the only thing affecting the value of the Peso, another major area thats leading to the decline of the Peso is the reliance (18%) on its countries sources of oil. Mexico actually has had to raise interest rates 3 times in the last year to help fight this decline.  After having our class with Mr. Nagarajan about operations something that really interested me was looking at all of these different factors to determine how to run a business. Governments run similarly to businesses in the sense that they are trying to run smoothly and maximize efficiency. So this led me to my next question which was how does a business or government respond when something completely out of their control happens? In this Specific case I really feel that the Mexican government is gonna have to wait it out and pray for Hillary. But when it comes down to it the Peso has a lot more to worry about then just Trump.

http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21707943-fear-trump-presidency-plays-havoc-mexicos-currency-slip-slidin-away

word count: 390

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