Sammi Wei's Blog

Merry Christmas, Happy Thanksgiving, Happy Birthday, or Congratulations? Whatever occasion it is, this Universal Wrapping Paper will make sure your gift is appropriately addressed.

This handy gift wrapper is truly innovative, and yet extremely simple. We’ve all played word search at some point in our lives, but no one has ever thought of the capabilities of the versatile features of word search. However, when presented in front of you as this universal wrapping paper, you would think “Why hasn’t anyone thought of it before?” Of course, word search! It’s versatile, which is perfect for mass production. Personally, I am getting sick of buying bulk packages of “personalized” cards and the likes which are not exactly personalized. Come clean-up time, I always find piles of unused identical “happy birthday” cards or “Merry Christmas” cards lying around my storage room, because I bought a bulk of them several years ago and have since used up all the “I love you” and “I miss you” cards.

Then I thought about how extensive this innovation can be! Forget wrapping paper or holiday cards, how about restaurant menus? Instead of changing today’s special with brush and chalk or brush and marker, bar-up a different word on a magnetic board with julienne magnets everyday! It’s economical for small businesses, and fun for the patrons.

This message from theDuct Tape Marketing blog by Jon Jantsch should speak to a lot of people: behind all the hype you generate with amazing marketing, you have to back it up with some good value creation. This is a rather simple idea, that marketing is a great way-paver to make a grande high-profile entry for an awesome new product, but it could lead to death sentence for a product which does not live up to the expectations.

Now let’s examine the pairing of a famous flop versus one of the most innovative products of the decade:

Flop: The N-Gage

Remember this little “taco”? It was Nokia’s pathetic attempt at nibbing off a portion of Nintendo’s Game Boy market. The system that promised to revolutionize the handheld experience died off officially in 2007 with a mere 3 million units sold (compared to over 220 million units sold of the Game Boy line). Why did it fail after so much hype was built around its launch? Because the consumers saw no value in it. It was a great chunk of gear to carry around, uncomfortable for both gaming AND mobile calling. The interface was far from friendly, the hardware was unfashionable, and it was highly UNcompatible with the Greatest Hits titles which were readily available for the Game Boy. So the N-Gage was launched, then struggled for a few years, and was left in the dust by the release of the iPhone.

Hit: The Nintendo Wii

The Wii revolutionized (pun intended, the Wii’s original name was Nintendo Revolution) home entertainment, as the Nintendo DS had handheld entertainment. Its creator, Shigeru Miyamoto, had a lot to live up to as he was the also the creator of the gaming prodigies, Mario and Zelda. Unlike Miyamoto’s failure with Virtua Boy (Nintendo’s flopped attempt at 3D gaming in its earlier stages), the Wii was a tremendous success, in fact, it had surpassed its predecessor, the NES, with 70 million units sold. This is because Nintendo made clearly communicated the “values” of the Wii to its target market.

Among all the buzz and noises generated recently by companies like Apple and Google, who brought wave after wave of innovation to the table, IBM had just stepped up the game. The research team at IBM have made a tremendous breakthrough in the field of artificial intelligence as they introduced Watson in the game of Jeopardy!. Watson, a powerful question answering AI, “walked” out of the game with $1 million of winnings.

The buzz was generated even before Watson appeared on the show, anticipation was built up intensely due to IBM’s brand equity after the success of Deep Blue the chess-playing AI in 1997.

Presumably named after the IBM founder, Watson runs Linux with 15 TB of RAM and 2880 processing cores which enables him to run 1 million tasks simultaneously. For reference, a typical personal computer runs four processing cores, out of which two can run concurrently. Watson is named the Question Answering AI because his main functionality is to find the answers to…ANY question. He parses the English language into natural language, and uses extremely advanced searching algorithms to search for all possible answers, then eliminates based on his confidence given the amount of found evidence. In other words, Watson can not only give answers, but also back them up by telling you WHY. IBM envisions Watson to be the pioneer in opening a whole realm of possibilities in the medical field by reducing the time needed for physicians to solve their everyday problems.

IBM has traditionally been focused on a target market of industrial and commercial technology users; however, with Watson, the IBM team is expecting to take a leap forward in consumer technology. In the next few years, Watson, combined with IBM’s developing nanosystem technology, will be extremely affordable and mobile, making it THE next big consumer mobile device.

So the Ozzy commercial for Brisk we watched in class really had me interested, and I went home and looked up “brisk super bowl commercial” on YouTube; and this what I found:

After some Googling, I learned that Eminem actually contributed to the script himself, which would explain “I NEED SOME CHICKS” and “SHUT UP AND DRINK IT”. I must say, this commercial really blew me away! I would so totally become a loyal Brisk drinker if I didn’t hate iced tea. When I watched the Ozzy version in class, I must admit I didn’t really catch anything funny in it if there was any, then I decided that I probably wasn’t part of Brisk’s “target market” and that it was stupid of Brisk to not make a commercial that university students would understand. But now I see that they had actually made two different commercials to appeal to different consumer segments, which is brilliant given that Super Bowl watchers are greatly diversified in age.

Now enough about Brisk, I also wanted to share another commercial I had found, the winner of Doritos Crash the Super Bowl contest:

I watched most of the finalist videos including this adorable Pug Attack video, and I must say that every single second of the winning entry hit GOLD. The commercial sends several strong messages to the viewers: 1) Doritos chips are SO good that you could neglect even the most important tasks and 2) their amazing taste can perform revival miracles on all types of lifeforms (creative dramatization).

What an eventful past week! The marketing midterm, the chaos in Cairo, and the issue which I will talk about today: the increasing force that is standing up against Usage-Based Billing internet services. This recent, and IMHO, horrid decision by the CRTC has taken the internet community by storm. Through joint efforts by consumers all across Canada, the issue has been brought to the immediate attention of MP’s in every district, of every party. Of course, the parties who are not currently in power saw this as an excellent opportunity to tear down the Conservative government, as the Liberals and the NDP have both officially committed themselves to reversing the CRTC decision.

This is not the first time that these two parties have demonstrated that their vision is aligned with advancement. With the Generation X-ers all coming of voting age, it is indeed wise for them to do all they could to win support of the young and technology-savvy generation who are looking for a modernized government. Aside from marketing largely on their pro-net neutrality stance and modernizing copyright law movements, the Liberals and the NDP have continuously criticized the Conservatives for “reject[ing] serious efforts to move the legislation forward” (NDP Press Release) and allowing “CRTC … to mean ‘Consumers Rarely Taken into Consideration” (Liberals News & Blog).

Personally, I would very much love to support our Canadian corporations, but if they continue to treat their consumers like cash cows, then I say let American competition come in and send Rogers/Bell/Telus straight to hell.

This is an advertisement I saw while browsing reddit this morning. I immediately thought of a term I learned back in high school, which at that moment was long lost in the back of my memories. So, as soon as I had a moment, I Googled the words “marketing without being annoying”, and found the term I was looking for: inbound marketing. But actually, I want to talk about something else today: take another look at the above ad, this is not an ad for Amazon or hamburgers, what is it selling?

Arguably, it’s not “selling” anything per say, but it is definitely a wise marketing move by the team over at reddit. reddit.com is widely know as one of the top two user-driven sources of news and media on the internet, the other being Digg. Both of these social discovery sites are user-driven, meaning that all content are submitted and voted on by the users. On reddit, you can vote a topic up or down, and on Digg you could digg it or bury it.

From a new user’s point of view, Digg is more appealing to the eye (redditors often mock its “pretty” UI), links to more serious news portals, and is older. What does reddit do to attract the new users who otherwise would most likely opt for Digg? Other than having an accepting community which initiated countless charitable acts and political movements, reddit’s ad space is frequently used to display heartwarming messages like the one above, and its mascot (the red alien) always helps with the cause. In general, reddit has a more homey feel compared to Digg, notice that Digg’s front man Matt Williams has the title of CEO, while redditors’ go-to guy is Erik Martin, a “community manager”.

Have you reddit?

For the past decade, Steve Jobs has been the synonym for Apple. He was the brand. When people bought MacBooks, they were buying Jobs. But recent events have people speculating that Apple is not just about Jobs anymore, has the Apple brand been redefined?

As Mr. Steve Jobs takes his third medical leave in his employment at Apple, the IT giant remains unshaken. Stock prices dropped by a mere ~4% but managed to make its way back within the next day. People are unconcerned by Jobs’ absence, as Apple releases its first quarterly report with indications of a 78% increase in profits, to a record-breaking $6 billion, or $6.43 per share. While five years ago, the Street would have seen to a drop of 20, 25%.

Given the speculations on the release dates of the iPhone 5 and iPad 2, Mr. Jobs may not be personally introducing these products to us this time around. People believe that Apple will run just fine without Jobs, at least in 2, 3 years. I suspect this strong faith in the company is the product of years of record breaking miracles performed by Apple. Just in the last year alone, Apple made tremendous breakthroughs in the market: the iPad, Gadget of the Year and fastest selling non-cellular phone gadget in world history; the iPhone 4, the fastest selling mobile handset in world history; and also the new MacBook air, the highest performing lightweight notebook.

The Apple brand is the record breaker.