rebecca yang

I recently read Alison’s blog post about Tim Horton’s proposal to expand of their products into vending machines, which will be an entirely new distribution channel to approach the customers. I agree that creative strategies are significant for a company to differentiate itself from other competitors. More importantly, a novel idea also has a great potential to boost up its profits.

Rogers, a Canadian communications and media company, demonstrates a good example of how to generate a new revenue stream by operating a shopping channel. Although Rogers hasn’t released any financial information about the shopping channel, the fact that its sales went up by 6 % from last year to 812 millions even during US economic recession indicates the success of the company’s television channel paring up with website sales. In addition to telecommunication base, Rogers one of the most important revenue streams, media assets should be another area for Rogers to focus on, and it has done a good job on running the shopping channel. It has substantially increased the sales by bringing the celebrities who are associated with the products to the TV show. It’s interesting to see how a communications company successfully takes over an online shopping website and branches out to other markets while its conventional television networks are encountering competitive advertising market. Capitalizing on its substantial influence over a variety of medias, Rogers has the upper to market and advertise its own shopping channel. One thing for sure is that thinking outside the box provides Rogers more opportunities to explore the market.

Here’s a link to its online shopping website:

http://www.theshoppingchannel.com/?s_kwcid=TC|14868|shopping%20channel||S|p|29919895380&gclid=CN2P05nQ6roCFQdyQgodaQYABA

Sources:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/the-shopping-channel/article14143467/?from=14151732

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/retail-therapy-rogers-cranks-up-shopping-tv/article14151732/

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/video/20130913theglobeandmailguylaurence-rogers-720p-3000kbpsmp4/article14280126/