Upon completing the Marketing Plan Assignment, I felt like I learned a great deal. I, for one, enjoyed the fact that this assignment was split into three parts, which made the assignment a lot easier to do and more time to revise our mistakes. For example, our group made some mistakes while analyzing the SWOT in Assignment #1. But because, you (Elaine), was able to give us feedback on those issues, which prevent us from making subsequent mistakes in the following assignments. Had this been just one entire report, we would be making the same consistent mistakes throughout the report, which would have damaged the quality of our work. In addition, I really enjoyed making the video as it inspired me to be a lot more creative compared to making a presentation. My favourite aspect of making the video was making the script. This was an especially tricky task because we had to make sure that whatever we said covered enough information but was not mundane or uncreative.
We faced several challenges while making this project. For example, no one in our group had any video filming or editing experience. In addition, due to the limited time and limited experience we had, we needed to scrap and construct many ideas before finally establishing a solid filming process. Many of our extremely creative ideas required expertise that none of us had. As a result, we had to put a lot effort into creating an idea that was both creative and feasible for us to do.
I hope that the people in our class will enjoy our video. I am also looking forward to watching their videos as well. With the peer feedback, we can really learn what we are doing well and what we need to improve on which will allow us to learn from our mistakes.
This is a reply to a blog post on Grow Marketing Blog run by Schaefer Marketing Solutions. In this post, Jessica touches on a marketing topic that we do not usually talk about in this course (because we have a separate course for this topic) and that is market and develops your own brand. When it comes to brands, a lot of the times people think of large corporations, but the truth is that we all have our own brands and just like how companies protect and promote their brands we must protect our own as well. Unfortunately, many people tend to overlook this issue. All we need to do is flip through some Facebook photos before we find an embarrassing shot. Although these embarrassing photos may seem funny to you and some friends, they may harm your own brand image to strangers and possible employers. Protecting your own brand especially important with the dawn of the internet since people can conduct research via the web and find whatever information they wish about a particular person. In addition, similar to how companies can conduct STP in a marketing strategy, I believe an individual can also devise a marketing strategy by building a STP strategy for one’s career goals as well. To me, all this shows is that marketing concepts that we learned in this course goes beyond just a theoretical framework, but these skills can be used for practical purposes in the future.
This is a reply to a student blog post. It’s that time of the year again; Black Friday. I completely agree with what Toby has pointed out about Black Friday. It’s one of the greatest marketing inventions of our century. Through this event firms are able to cover pretty much the entire communication process from encoding to feedback thus gathering throngs and throngs of customers. However, one aspect that I cannot ignore is the ethics of an event like this.
After-holiday shopping sprees have become a very vital aspect of modern consumerist culture. As a consumer myself, I think it is perfectly understandable as to why we participate in events like this. I mean practically speaking, who wouldn’t want to buy an ASUS S400CA ultrabook with an Intel i5 processor and 24GB of SSD for $639.99? Just talking about something like this makes my mouth water. As a result, I think annual events like Black Friday reveals the bottomless pit that consists of our desire consumer goods. Every year we somehow need to buy the largest HD TV sets or the most fashionable clothing as if our current wardrobe isn’t big enough or the 42” flat screen in our living room isn’t good enough. In a way, I think we are all like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby because we all believe in a green light albeit a new iPad, a new dress, a new computer, or even a new car. So the question to marketers is this: Is it really a great ethical to use Black Friday to promote excessive consumption of consumer goods despite of the ramification like environmental detriments that may result from this overconsumption.
Amidst all this shopping frenzy, North American shoppers have to remember that we are among the most privileged of privileged people on this planet. Next time you feel like you need a 50” LCD TV to watch your Netflix shows in HD remember that there are millions upon millions of people on this planet that still consider electricity to be a luxury. So maybe on Boxing Day, instead of lining up in front of Best Buy at 5:00 am, try going to the Salvation Army and giving some of your stuff away. Furthermore, remind yourself that whatever you plan to buy will not satisfy you forever; there will be always be a newer iPad next year. “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And one fine morning——” — F. Scott Fitzgerald
The internet, over the past couple of days, I believe has received its new fad: Bitcoins. Bitcoins are currency much like the Canadian Dollar or the British Pound. However, it solely exists in the digital world and can only be used on the internet. This technology, much like government issued currency, has become popular among criminals as well as regular people. One question that has always been on my mind over the recent years has always been: How has this currency become so popular? Usually for anything to become popular, someone has to have promoted the product in some way. Yet, in the roughly five and a half years that this currency has gone into existence, it has not promoted itself in any way, shape, or form. This is not only a phenomenon that is unique to Bitcoins but also products like the Tesla Model S, a line of cars that runs solely on electricity. These products have all become extremely popular without any promotion.
Under the traditional marketing model, a company needs to use the 4 P’s in order to get a product out there. However, I think these products were able to gain a large amount of users solely by providing a good product. Consider Bitcoins for a moment. This currency has offered many benefits over other means of electronic transactions. For example, this currency is completely anonymous transactions as every individual user is identified by a code. Furthermore, only 21 million of these coins could possibly exist, which reduces the possibility of currency conversion. As a result, these features essentially allowed the product to market itself without any promotion.
As early as 2004, the MPAA (Motion Pictures Association of America) has claimed that online media piracy has caused substantial damage to their industry. Here, this infographic suggests that American movie studios lose up to $25 billion per year as a result of online piracy. To counter this loss, media associations like the MPAA, IFPI, and RIAA has spent a combined of $200 billion in 2009 to counter piracy. In addition, these billion dollar associations have tried to pressure the government enact new laws such as SOPA that aims at censorship of the internet. Furthermore, according to the RIAA, anyone caught with pirated material can face up to $250,000 in penalities and 5 years in prison.
So…. the big question for me right now is: Is all this really necessary? As a poor university student, I am willing to contend that many people who pirate belong to a poorer demographic. That means stopping people from pirating will not actually increase your sales since these piraters will be too poor to afford your product anyways. Personally I see pirating as a means of marketing and there is a great deal of evidence to support that. For example, The UK communications regulator OFCOM published a study with 4,400 internet users which showed that 75% of piraters are in fact “hybrids” (people that pirate and purchase legal media content). The study further suggested that this demographic of internet users spend almost three times more on legal media content as those who do not pirate. In addition, a study at Columbia University shows that most internet piraters also pay for legal media content. Furthermore, another study at the London School of Economics demonstrates that despite of the concerns of online piracy; Hollywood movies achieved global box office sales amounting to US$35 billion in 2012, which is 6% greater than 2011 numbers.
Through these statistics, I think it is evident that giant media companies are way too worried about the negative aspects of online piracy. So for all the big Hollywood execs and producers that are reading this: instead of considering online media piracy as a means of revenue loss, think of it as a marketing expenditure.
Facebook popularity has grown dramatically since its founding in 2004. Starting with a user base of several Harvard students, the social media network has grown to over 1 billion users in 2013. Below is a diagram demonstrating the internet traffic across Facebook throughout the globe. Clearly, the website whose aim is to connect the world seems to be doing a pretty fantastic job if you ignore the black void hovering over China, the country that hosts roughly one seventh of the world’s entire population.
Following the 2009 riots in the Xingjiang Autonomous Region, the Chinese government decided to shut off most forms of foreign social media from the country including Facebook and Twitter. However, this week, the government announced that a roughly 17 km2 area of Shanghai known as the Free Trade Zone will have access to Facebook. For the Menlo Park social media giant, this new development could potentially double their user base. However, this deregulatory action by a totalitarian regime is also a great example of ethical issues facing today’s social media marketing sector.
Facebook’s user base is not only massive but also very connected. As a result, the firm can provide marketers with a marketing platform that can quickly promote products or services to people across the globe. However, at the same time regular people can also use these large and well-connected user bases of social media websites to communicate stories, knowledge, and more importantly ideas. Ideas that can change views, ideas that can change behaviour, and ideas that can change governments. Hence, the ethical challenge facing social media sites today, is whether or not they should take responsibility for political and social instability caused by their services. Milton Friedman once claimed that the “one and only” responsibility of a firm is to “increase its profits”. But based on recent events such as the Chinese government’s heavy control on social media, firms such as Facebook may need to focus a lot more than simply increasing profits.
source: http://adage.com/article/global-news/facebook-find-ventures-china/228068/ *note: Please click on the link to visit the picture in its orginal site and actually click on the logos. The site will tell you the Chinese version of that service. You’ll be surprised at what they have behind that thousand kilometer long government controlled cyberwall!
I was reading over Tony Liu’s post regarding how Tencent pursues a strategy of being a “copycat” since it develops numerous social media tools that is abnormally similar to services offered by other sites such as Twitter, WordPress, or MSN. As a result, Tony criticised this behaviour as “not ethically right”, which is an opinion that I support 200%. However, let’s remember that numerous social media services such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are banned in China. So, if you think about it, the only way that Chinese people can access any form of social media is by using the “pirated” services of state approved corporations like Tencent. As a result, I believe this issue of the company being a “copycat” is a very interesting ethical dilemma since if we stop the firm from stealing the ideas of other companies; we would have complied with the ideas of business ethics, but at the same time, we would have deprived everyone in China access to very important communication service that is becoming more and more fundamental to life, which is not very ethical. Hence, this issue has become another example of how the interests of the firm collide directly with the interests of society, which is one of the greatest struggles of the modern businessperson.
A very popular trend among entrepreneurs today is the “Lean Startup”, which is essentially a methodology for building a successful startup. One of the main characteristic that attracts me to this idea of building a “lean” startup instead of a traditional business is the methodology’s emphasis on using numerous ways to measure and test the success of a new firm’s product. Moreover, this idea stresses that companies should not only keep track of its assets, liabilities, or cash flow, but also the different things that they have learned about their products/services over time. This idea made a lot of sense to me since keeping track of the lessons a company learns can be used as a key tool for the firm to innovate and change their products/services so that it attracts more consumers. However, like any new thoughts or ideas, the Lean Startup has received its fair share of criticism. For example, there is a strong argument in the technology sector for the “fat startup”. But unlike the Lean Startup, which provides an encompassing guide on how to run a startup, this idea only focuses on the ways in which a starting company should allocate its resources. Nevertheless, I still believe that the “Lean Startup” is a very new idea that should be followed with caution since unlike traditional ideas, the results of following this methodology is not yet very visible.
Marketing Before Funding is a blog maintained by a soon-to-be Sauder graduate, Mike Abasov. The goal of this blog is to provide startups and small companies with simple yet effective tools and strategies to market themselves. One key characteristic that I enjoy about this blog is the fact that it teaches a lot of stuff that isn’t traditionally taught in schools. For example, most of the marketing strategies that are explained on his blog use different social media and web based tools, which differ from the traditionally tactics to marketing that business schools teach. However, at the same time, this blog applies a lot marketing principles such as value propositions and point of difference to these new tech savvy strategies. As a result, I believe this blog can be an excellent supplement to the different ideas that one can learn in school. Moreover, I enjoy the fact that it teaches startups to use marketing tactics that will allow them to actually sell their products and become self-sufficient instead of constantly relying for venture capital, which was one of the biggest issues in the Dot-Com Bubble. As a result, I believe this blog to be both innovative and extremely knowledgeable.
I don’t know about you, but traveling for me has always been about hotels, sample-sized bottles of body wash, and crappy tasting coffee. However, Airbnb, an e-commerce firm aims to change that ( If you don’t know how the company’s service works, go click on the video below). So far, by collecting a small percentage from all the transactions that happen on its site, analysts estimate that the firm’s revenue grew from $8.4 to $52.8 million in a year, which is quite expected as the total amount of rooms booked on Airbnb grew 500% in one year, as shown in the infographic below.
However, I believe this phenomenal growth will eventually slow down as several fundamental issues facing the firm’s service become more and more visible to users. For example, a little over a year ago, a woman reported that the people who booked her house on Airbnb completely vandalized and burglarized her residency. Although, the firm has compensated the lady and dealt with the situation, the lady nevertheless claims that she will now use “nice, safe” hotel rooms next time she travels. Furthermore, a user that attempted Airbnb’s service to book an apartment in New York, ended up (after much communication) discovering that the rooms she wanted were taken, even though the site still listed them as vacant. Hence, I believe these issues which can cause a variety of negative reactions from the customer from feelings of annoyance in the second example to trauma in the first.
![How to Dominate Social Media with HootSuite [VIDEO]](http://marketingbeforefunding.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/marketingbeforefunding.png)
