Monthly Archives: November 2012

A popular and famous makeup guru on Youtube, Michelle Phan, was a co-founder of the company Ipsy. The company provides an interesting service and good targeted towards women and teenage girls. For ten dollars each month, Ipsy provides customers with a bag of sample sized and full sized beauty products from a variety of brands. These products have been tested and highly recommended by a team of stylists, who choose what products to include in the ‘glam bags’.

The Ipsy website is unique in that they provide video tutorials informing customers of ways to use the products in the glam bags. The website also contains quizzes that customers can take so that the team of stylists at Ipsy can recommend the right type of products for their glam bags.

I find this a very creative business idea and would definitely sign up for the glam bags if the website shipped to Canada. Unfortunately, it is currently only available for residents of the United States. With so many different brands and products in the beauty industry, it is hard to weed out the best products. Not to mention, it is disappointing to purchase an expensive full sized product, only to find out the product does absolutely nothing for you. The appeal of Ipsy is that it is inexpensive and allows customers to sample a variety of well known or new products.

The topic of social entrepreneurship really interested me when it was brought up  in class. I suppose I never fully understood the concept of it until this year. It’s amazing how people are able to create a social impact while still making profits using their business skills.

While searching online for information regarding social entrepreneurship, I came across Darell Hammond, the founder and CEO of KaBOOM! Hammond was 24 when he read an article in the Washington Post about two children that had no place to play and suffocated playing inside of a car. Inspired, Hammond then became determined to have playgrounds accessible to every child in the United States so a situation like that would never arise again.  The organization, KaBOOM!, then came to be and has built over 2000 playgrounds since it became officially founded in 1996.

This story was inspiring to me because someone at such a young age was so determined to make a positive impact on society. Hammond discovered an issue and made the effort to do something to resolve it. I really look up to those that are not only concerned with money, but with making positive returns to society as well.

I came across an article on Small Business Trends’ blog titled “How to Turn Website Visitors Into Buyers“. The blog post provided advice for online retail websites to attract customers during the busy holiday season.

A recent survey about holiday shopping trends by PriceGrabber found that 88 percent of respondents plan to research their holiday gift purchases in advance to find the best deals.

Online retailing is a growing trend. I see more and more retail stores now opening online retail websites. As an online shopper myself, I was interested in what tips the blog would give to make buyers out of visitors. There are many times I would go on a website and add plenty of items into my online shopping cart without the slightest intentions of ever actually purchasing them.

The post suggested things such as free shipping, special promotions and prevention of shopping cart abandonment. In other words, online websites should offer points of differentiation to set them aside from their competitors. Apparently, websites that offer free shipping with a minimum purchase achieve the best results.

I think that special promotions definitely entice customers to make purchases. Especially during the holiday season, when everyone is on the hunt for gifts.

How to Turn Website Visitors Into Buyers– Fred Lizza

In response to Shawn’s blog, I agree that those ads that are played before a video are rather irritating and irrelevant to the video I am watching most of the times. Not to mention, the ads are extremely repetitive for someone that is an active online video watcher. Who wants to watch a Maybelline  mascara commercial when you’re just trying to see the new trailer for a new movie that’s coming out soon?

However, I do think that Web-Video Advertising is good for companies in such a way that they can reach out to a great audience. Sites like Youtube are growing communities. It has come to a point that successful youtubers with many subscribers can earn great amounts of money through their videos. It would make sense that companies want their ads to appear on wildly popular videos. I believe web-video advertising would be more effective if the advertisement before the video was actually relevant to the type of video that follows. Wouldn’t a company want their advertisement to reach the target market of their product?

I recall a time before youtube placed advertisements before their videos. However, I do understand the rationality of web-video advertising, as inconvenient it may be to the viewer.

Today in my comm101 class, an article “How Target Figured Out a Teen Girl was Pregnant Before her Dad did” appeared in one of the lecture slides. The lecture was regarding management information systems and business technology management. Although only a brief section of the article was posted in the slides, the title of it certainly caught my attention. I found the article online to find out exactly how Target could find this sort of information, as I was rather curious.

Apparently, Target assigns an ID number to customers that are connected to them through their credit card of email address. Targets puts together histories of purchases for the ID numbers. They then compare the purchase history of women that have signed up for Target’s baby registry and watch for common purchases made by the women. Due dates within a range could even be estimated through analyzing certain products in purchase histories.

More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.

I find it unsettling that Target uses this system to deliver coupons to the right person at the right time. I understand that technology systems can be extremely useful to companies but I find that estimating women’s due dates is taking it a bit too far.