During term 2, I am pleased to say that our grouped worked relatively well overall. Although there were moments where we could of pre-planned a bit earlier, we managed to complete everything within the due date. Having to complete the first two assignments last minute, we wanted to ensure that we completed assignment 3 well before the due date.

Regardless, I have reason to believe that I enjoyed the marketing assignment 3 the most. Firstly, this assignment is more flexible. There were a number ways and concepts we could have applied in the video, which delivers, and communicates the effectiveness of our company’s marketing mix. It allows us to apply some form of creativity while being professional simultaneously. Secondly, is that we escaped having to present the actual content, and knowing my group well enough for most of term 2, I’m pretty sure they were relieved about that as well.

Overall I thought the assignments played an important role in this course, not only did they indirectly help you catch up with the content you were suppose know a while ago. But they also give you the opportunity to apply them with real life examples; in our case it was Zara. It enhances the overall learning experience and the value gained by completing these assignments far exceeds the simple act reading slides and the textbook. Thank for everything Tamar!

Referring back to Quins blog about Enbridge’s’ illusive marketing strategy, I would like to share my thoughts on this issue. Without a doubt, having Enbridge provide unrealistic figures to the government and the general public raised a couple of concerns for everybody. However, concluding it as being an un-ethical act would be questionable in my opinion.

It seems to me that Enbridge has underestimated the power of its external stakeholders (environmentalists, government ie.). This is a common mistake most companies encounter during daily operations, and the consequences are rather high as it could affect their brand loyalty as well as image. Perhaps Enbridge were too concerned with pleasing their shareholders, senior management that they simply neglected their external stakeholders – After all, Enbridge did only provide quantitative benefits from an economical prospective.

To conclude about what Enbridge did, as being un-ethical, is rather rash. If you look at the bigger picture, Enbridge simply failed to communicate the added value of this project over the associated risks to the public. It would have been a lot better, If they did provide informative environmental risks associated this project along with proper short term and long-term responses if the unfavorable event were to occur. In the end, it isn’t a question whether or not this was ethical; it was whether Enbridge truly understood the interests of its external stakeholders. In this case, they didn’t.

This external blog post mentioned a story where a server and a manager at a chili restaurant committed themselves into solving little problem regarding an autistic 7 – year old girl. Long story short, the little girl was unsatisfied with her cheeseburger because it appeared to be “broken” as it was cut in half. The server, Lauren, took some time to figure what the problem was and decided to solve this issue. In the end, she managed to get the whole restaurant involved in order to bring a non-broken cheeseburger to this young autistic girl. When this young girl received the new burger, she was so happy; her sister took a photo of her kissing the new burger and posted it on Facebook along with the touching story. This random act of kindness managed to get quite a positive publicity stunt as the Facebook post got up to 40 000 comments with nearly up to a million likes.

Overall, there were two things that really struck me about this blog post. Firstly, I never really knew that social media such as Facebook could play a huge role to promote free advertising for a particular company. In this case, chili restaurant managed to achieve up to nearly one million likes. This in turn brings huge intangible benefits to the company such as improvement towards public relations. Secondly, having this occurred due to one small act of random kindness made me re-evaluate the power of customer service and satisfaction. I couldn’t cease to stop thinking that all this had occurred because of one little act of doing.