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Welcome to UBC Blogs. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
Business Ethics
We all know that sports teams are huge multi-million dollar firms that pay their players ridiculous amounts of money. It was no different this time when Real Madrid paid Tottenham Hotspurs 100 million euros (140 million CAD) for the services of Welshman Gareth Bale.
“Bale was cheap. The signing of Gareth Bale is the model of Real Madrid, signing the best player in the world at this moment, and that is what I say.” – Florentino Perez (president of Real Madrid)
But is it really ethical to have spent that much money on securing a player’s signature? In my opinion it is money not well spent, and it begs the question on where ethics have gone in sports? With that quantity of money spent on a player, Real Madrid have, to me, failed as an athletic institution and have become more of a giant that feeds on the smaller firms, like Tottenham. In the eyes of Real Madrid fans, however, this signing was what they wanted all summer long, and Gareth Bale merchandise will probably end up covering the huge $140 CAD price. How can someone consider that signing “cheap” when there are people who don’t even have enough money to eat? It bedazzles me.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/football/transfer-news/manchester-united-made-100m-gareth-2297792
Facebook & Snapchat
Unlike Instagram, Snapchat turned down a 3 billion dollar offer from Facebook. Facebook is trying to become a monopoly in social media by taking over all the up-and-coming companies that are just trying to get into the market.
As stated in the article “kids today flit from one thing to another with alacrity” and what Facebook is doing is making sure that the social media that kids bounce between, belongs to them and is not a threat to their company. Barriers to entry to the social media market are relatively low compared to others, and hence Facebook is trying to intimidate the small companies like Snapchat, who might be risking it by not taking the offer.
It’s going to be easier for a kid to turn away from Snapchat than it is for them to turn away from Facebook, so I don’t know if it’s smart to turn down Facebook’s offer because it’s more likely seeing Snapchat stop being used than Facebook.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/11/16/shapchat-s-diss-captures-facebook-s-cruel-cool-world.html
Social Media Rising
It’s not a secret that social media is the trend for marketing nowadays. What caught my attention from this article is the fact that it states that social media marketing is “not an option”, and at first I thought that it meant that it was no longer feasible and obviously I was interested, but instead I found out, not to my surprise, that what it was trying to say is that it’s not feasible NOT to use social media.
It is true, what Kirti Dwivedi says in the article, it’s not only cheaper and more accessible, but all your stakeholders are using social media now and to ignore it would be not only to ignore a large customer base, but to let your competitor take your existing customer pool for their own advantage. A couple of years ago, it was only teenagers and kids that were using social media, but now the majority of adults who utilize the internet use it and it’s those adults who have purchasing power, not the kids.
In my opinion, the article is true but it’s missing the fact that social media also depends on what company you’re trying to run because if it’s a business to business firm like a mining company where they don’t sell their minerals at a corner store, then it’s perhaps not useful.
http://www.businessreviewcanada.ca/marketing/social-media/using-social-media-for-business-is-no-longer-an-option
Burnt Apple
Apple isn’t a company known for its ethics, it’s not a company that’s got a good reputation because of its CSR; instead it’s a company that creates high-tech devices that are focused for the average day-to-day use of people who aren’t necessarily tech savvy. Not surprisingly, Apple is being accused of tax evasion in Italy. Apple allegedly hid 1.3 billion dollars from the government and didn’t pay taxes on that money.
The article states that Apple took advantage of Italy’s hectic government and all the trouble that it was going through with the President, in order to avoid paying tax and just trying to walk away unharmed. What’s special to me about this article is that Apple is a huge company, and it’s got a wide variety of scandals and unethical behavior that its accused of, yet its sales don’t suffer much from this on the long run, maybe they take a hit on the stock exchange for a short period of time but in the end they always come back stronger.
Whatever Apple does to keep its customer base loyal to them, I don’t know, but in my opinion it’s not ethical that they make people so addicted to their products that they always come back for the next new product even though the products haven’t changed in years. In short, they still only sell MP3 players, computers and phones.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/11/15/italian-prosecutors-investigate-apple-subsidiary-for-alleged-tax-evasion.html
Is Twitter Bound to Fail?
Twitter wants to raise $1 billion from its IPO, but there are lots of things in the way that could potentially scare off the investors. I think that Twitter just doesn’t have that winning formula that Facebook does, because Facebook is a lot more than just posting statuses, it allows for easy conversations to happen between people, it includes their birthdays, advertisements on the side of the page and also games.
Twitter, on the other hand, relies solely on its tweets and everything that’s worthwhile doing in Twitter is posting 140 character messages for the world to see. That’s why they have started to reach a plateau in growth, where they will just not keep growing. It doesn’t matter if they raise $1 billion from their IPO; their growth is going to be limited because it doesn’t offer something that’s able to challenge Facebook, while Facebook does offer similar things to Twitter, with the recent introduction of the hashtag.
I think that twitter needs to reshape their USP and offer something that Facebook can’t, and maybe then will they start to grow again at the same rate as before.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/the-short-message-from-twitters-ipo-slowinggrowth/article14712467/
Lululemon Faulty Pants
Supply Chain Management is what I associated this article with when I read it. There’s obviously not Total Quality Management in the factory where Lululemon produces its pants. The pants that they received from their order were sub-par and when a firm like Lululemon who is based around quality gets something that just doesn’t do, then it’s required of them to send it back and it’s their supply chain which allows them to do so, because they can tell their suppliers to give them new and better quality ones without affecting their relationship.
Another thing that I was able to spot out from this article was brand image. Lululemon didn’t want their faulty batch of pants to be worn by anyone because then that would mean that they don’t have a strong brand image and hence they recycled these pants but they weren’t going to be sold for less or even given out for free, because that would mean that people associate these faulty pants with Lululemon forever because not everyone reads about everything that’s going on inside the company.
http://www.businessreviewcanada.ca/money_matters/lululuemon-recalls-see-through-yoga-pants