After reading Wong, Elaine’s blog post — sPhone 4, I would really want to make some comment on her post.
In Asian culture, mainly Chinese culture, people believe that what they burn is what their ancestors can get in heaven, thus they burn paper-products to their ancestors time to time to make their ancestors’ afterlife more wealthy and happy. This has given many opportunities for the businessmen to earn profit. In the video businessmen has made paper-sPhone 4 and sPad. The products is actually a imitation of the iPhone 4 and iPad. Even when the white color version of the iPhone 4 and iPad is not released in real world, you can already buy its paper-products and burn it to your ancestors. So your ancestors can even use the white version of iPhone 4 and iPad earlier than you in real life!
This post in fact inspired me about the problem of commercializing everything in our lives. The most frequent issue happening nowadays is that businessmen always find an excuse by claiming that it’s holiday to sell their special made product for that holiday.
Holidays true meanings are not clear for many people now. For example, many people in the world today actually do not know the true meaning of Christmas and Easter. They have no idea why there are these two holidays. They only know what they need to do in these holiday such as buying present for each other on Christmas and eating those chocolate-made eggs on Easter. These are indeed what the businessmen have done to promote their special-made products for these holidays. However, these ideas are overwhelming everyone’s mind and they just relate the holidays to these activities.
For example, I met a Japanese friend last year in Vancouver. She was an exchange student from Tokyo. She was in Vancouver during the Christmas holiday, however, when I told her about what Christmas really represents. She was so surprised about it. She said that she never heard of Jesus! I was stunned at that time when she said!
I believed that this is because the overwhelming commercializing of business approach used all over the world. So, in my opinion, the marketing department in each company can actually think of how to include more of the true meaning of the holidays in their promotion of special-made products. And I think this is indeed an important issue!