Day: November 17, 2013

In the past five years, Lululemon has tripled its annual revenue and expanded from 70 stores to 200 stores due to its popularity in North America. However, the colourful, stretchy and form-fitting pants tend to be inadvertently see-though and Lululemon has had to recall some of its products.

Who to blame?

This spring, 17 % of the black yoga pants were recalled and the company says the problem is the fabric used and blames the gaffe on its Taiwanese supplier. The shipments to Lululemon go through a certification process, which Lululemon has approved, and so the blame is thrown back and forth.

Not the first time

This is not the first product glitch made by Lululemon. New York Times investigated in 2007 the Vitasea line of seaweed fabric that claims to add marine amine acids, minerals and vitamins to the skin, and found that that the fabric did not contain any of the health claims at all. Ultimately, Lululemon is responsible for the standard of their products and with this news, they are not doing their research.

Link to article

Spotify is an award-winning digital music service, already used and loved by millions of Europeans, that is expected to compete with ITunes, offering costumers free access to approximately 15 million songs. The biggest difference is, that by using Spotify, consumers are leasing the right to listen to music, while on iTunes, consumers own the right to their downloaded music.

Anyone can use Spotify’s service for free with ads, for 5 dollars a month without ads and 10 dollars a month for mobile access. Rumors claimed apple wanted to buy the company, but instead they launched the a new music service that makes it easier for consumers to sync music and other data to different devices.

Though Spotify has taken over some of iTunes’ market share in Europe, it still is the most successful music store in history. ITunes was the first to enter this type of market, which is a significant benefit, and makes it harder for Spotify to compete.

As I read through my classmate’s blogs, I came across a blogpost Yssa Romero wrote about Coca-Cola’s new campaign, taken from this article. This really caught my eye, and I have to say I was surprised Coca-Cola, one of the world’s biggest companies, could run this kind of campaign.

As a promotional strategy, Coca-Cola released a campaign that featured a series of bottle caps that were supposed to be used to create humorous sentences. The bottles had offensive phrases on them, which also had different meaning in other languages. For example, “retard” is an offensive word in English, but translates to “shower” in French.

The marketing department in Coca-Cola did not do a very good job on this campaign. What was supposed to be funny turned out to be offensive and confusing.

People love shopping everything from clothes to groceries at the lowest price possible. Chains like Walmart and H&M are some the most successful, but what is the real price of having such low-price chains?

Allison Bullen talks about the ethical problem Walmart had where many Walmart employees in the States stepped forward saying they were being treated unethically. The employees said there were discrimination, very low pay and bad working hours in their workforce. The employees took action and the case got publicity that could damage Walmart’s reputation, pressuring Walmart to change their unethical behavior.

H&M got a lot of publicity for the circumstances their workers had to work in at their factories. This is not uncommon in the clothing industry, but both H&M and Walmart are big companies that should take more responsibility of the working environment and how their employees are treated.

According to this article people still like working for a man. A survey of 2,059 adults found that both men and women would prefer to work for a male boss. Though 41% of respondents said they had no preference, 35% said that, if given the choice, they would choose a male boss over a female boss. Twenty-three percent said they’d rather have a female boss. But what is the difference between working for a man and a woman?

Women are often accused of being more personal and relationship-orientated, but there is no evidence that men are more task-oriented then women. However, the most obvious difference is the leadership style. There are small, but noticeable differences between male and female managers, but the similarities between female and male managers are much greater than the inequalities. I believe that it is better to focus on leaders and their skills, regardless of gender.