Sue O Lee's Blog

Did you know that Costco CEO and Co-Founder Jim Sinegal’s salary is only 350,000?

Although it is one of USA’s largest corporations, he refuses to live the lavish life of luxury. In Costco, their employees get treated extremely well, covering 94 percent of their health case and wages starting at 10 dollars an hour. Because of this the employees feel safe working at Costco, keeping turnovers extremely low.

This is a huge contrast from Wal-Mart’s business plan of cutting costs to the bare minimum to maximize revenue. Some people even went so far to create a website in petition for their acts.

Which approach is the best for maximizing costs? For Jim to maximize costs, he took money out of his own pocket so that employees do not have to suffer. Wal-Mart does the exact opposite, keeping the wealth while the employees get the butt-end. It all comes down to a matter of perception.

We cannot expect Wal-Mart’s culture to be top of the line as a result. It will lack the benefits of happy employees such as high turnover, absenteeism, and productivity. One thing’s for sure, I’d never want to work for Wal-Mart because of this.

Globalization.

Currently, a lot of our manual labour is being outsourced to countries, the two big names being China and India. Almost everything nowadays is made in China, and most of the customer service care is handled in India.

With the continuous rise of growing Chinese and Indian economies and the rise of wages in said countries, cost for production is rising. A good thing, yes, but every coin has 2 sides.

Because of globalization with the aid of technology, jobs are being lost in North America. The market is becoming more and more competitive, and simple and repetitive jobs are taken over by China who is large in work-thirsty hands. Another problem that poses a threat are condoning the use of sweatshops and child labour. Cheap work comes at a heavy ethical cost.

How can we solve this problem?

One solution is to cut wages in North America. This will cut down in the amount of outsourcing done to other countries by appealing to business owners. Creating media attention and boycotting of companies that use sweatshop labour is another solution.

Sweatshops are unethical. Because of loose employment laws employees are being abused, while being overworked and underpaid. We need to end this.

I want to change the world for the better. Make life worth living for people who have next to nothing right now. One way I can reach this goal is through social entrepreneurship.

A social entrepreneur is someone, through business practices, builds a venture to create social change in today’s society.

One organization that I admire is Kiva. Kiva is a micro-lender. What this means is that it lets people from poverty-stricken nations to receive capital in which they build a business out of. The person would in turn, pay back the money in full to the person who lent the money. The loaner could then in turn choose to lend the money out again or hold onto it.

Because of the lack of motivation of banks to lend them money, aspiring entrepreneurs in third world countries cannot muster up enough dough to support their business plan. Kiva changes this by offering a channel for easy funds, while earning a profit by charging them 35.21% average interest rate to handle the operations of the business as well as relending that same profit. Some might say that the interest rate is high, but reports show that the benefit they receive pales in comparison to this minuscule fee.

Hello readers, look at this video, now back to me, now back at this video, now back to me. Sadly, this isn’t your marketing strategy, but if you stopped using old generic marketing methods and switched to viral marketing you could pretend like Old Spice’s you. Look down. Back up. Where are you? You’re in the information age with the most social media tools ever available. Look again, the video is now DIAMONDS. I’m on UBC Blogs.

Old Spice have garnered a lot of attention lately because of its unique approach to marketing strategy. Let me show you how they rose to fame.

But first, what is viral marketing?

Viral marketing is simply, like a virus, spreading of advertisements through word of mouth. Person A might really like something and send it to Person B C and D, who also sends it to all their friends. Awesome amounts of brand awareness, for potentially an exceptionally low cost.

After the video’s success, Proctor and Gamble decided to create interaction with its audience in the form of twitter video responses. Old Spice made sure to reply to social figures with lots of followers such as Digg founder Kevin Rose.

Old Spice has repositioned itself as number one in consumers minds for Men’s deodorant and body wash.

Not bad.