Month: November 2010

McDonalds

 McDonalds is the largest fast-food restaurant in the world. There are more than 30,000 chains of retail stores in over 119 countries, thus McDonalds is very famous all over the world for its brand name, logo, symbols, and characters. McDonald sells licensed and training to the person who wants to join them in the fast food industry. However, every country has slightly different marketing strategies and food taste, although they are all coming from the U.S. My classmate Angel Chan’s third blog about Monopoly! It is a type of strategy using in Alberta and British Columbia McDonalds. This time I am going to differentiate the strategies in Taiwan.

Taiwan’s McDonalds

McDonalds has been in Taiwan for 23 years. Although, Taiwan is not a big country but there are 338 McDonald’s restaurants existed on the tiny island. Taiwan is a place full of many delicious foods and the price is very cheap. How can McDonalds be so successful in Taiwan? This question has been in my mind for many years until I take Comm. 296. I finally understand and realized why.

Promotion:

Promotion is a big crucial issue for McDonalds. Every couple of months McDonalds will launch new ads with cute and funny toys/dolls, likes Hello Kitty, to attract children or sometimes they will have new burger to introduce to the market. The ads makes the burger seems very delicious (although it is not) to attracts many people to try it. The Hello Kitty dolls provided a great increase on the sales. I remember when I was grade 6, Hong Kong and Taiwan McDonalds had launched a promotion that when you bought a meal plus some amount of money you could get a pair of Hello Kitty doll. Every day there were huge amount of people waiting in the line just want to get a pair of Hello Kitty doll. Parents, children, teenagers, couples, boys, and girls were just crazy about it.

Service:

McDonalds provides good quality of service and environment in Taiwan. Most McDonalds have children area for children to play on slides. People are very nice, and after you order, someone will deliver your meal to your seat. Also, there is free delivery to your home. When you walk in to McDonalds you feel good because the environment is very nice and clean.

Different Culture Different Food:

Taiwan has more choices than Canada’s McDonalds and the price is cheaper. There are some meals we can find in Taiwan’s McDonalds but not in Canada. For example, the new burger, corn soup and different flavor fries. In this I can see that McDonalds has put a lot effort in different country. They know that people will get board of eating the same things and also they know the company has to fit in to the culture in order to stay long. It costs $4 CAD for a meal and if you want upgrade it add 50 cents to get another burger in Taiwan. However, it still quite expensive compared with other food.

Upon browsing through all the blogs of my classmates, I came across my calss mate Stacey Barry’s first blog about Living the dream! It was an eye-opener for someone like me a city dweller from Taiwan to realize that there is a beautiful place such as this existed on earth. If it wasn’t because of the Australian government’s campaign and my classmate’s blogs I would never get to know such a place. 

After having had read my classmate’s blogs, I immediately went online search for more information about this campaign and the island. The information that I had found was very exciting and enticing for me. The job the Australian government was offering worth about $105,000 US dollars for six months and plus free air tickets from the winner’s home town to the Hamilton Island. All the winner had to do was to explore the island and to write about it on the blogs everyday for everyone to see in the world.

The Australian government started this campaign because of they want to protect AUD $18 billion tourism industry. Once the adds was posted to the world it generated 1.4 million applicants around the world in very short period of time. This was best advertistment ever, because for all the amount they had invest in one person they get back billions in turns of tourism money. Because of this adds everybody know about there is an beautiful island before the winner writes on the blog. 

These are some applicants’ video from different country:

Starbucks is going to expend market in China. They are going to establish coffee farms in Yunnan province to secure high quality coffee beans for the China market. Starbucks director said that China is going to be the second largest market after the U.S. I think this is the win-win situation for Starbucks and China finically and economically. However, there is a environmental issue to be considered. If Starbucks use sun-grown coffee farms method then it will have several negative effects on the environments such as deforestation, pesticide pollution, habitat destruction, soil and water degradation as the results of modern coffee bean farming practice. I think Starbucks and the China government should consider this when they are planning.

Human like to see nice or beautiful things. So companies are paying more attention to packaging for their products in order to attract consumers into buying. They also try to improve the image of the company constantly. However, not only products need nice packaging, people also need it, too especially movie starts and singers.

In this 21^st century, people love sexy image especially the male population. The key point of being a successful singer in America is being sexy and fancy. Lady Gaga is a very famous America singer. I believe everybody have heard about her and her songs. Her company is very successfully at using those two key points to package her. Every time we see her on the TV, she always wears very sexy and fancy clothes that shocked all the audiences every time. Such acts have provided shock value to the performance and the singer, thus have made an impression on the viewers whether they like her or not. This is the impact of the packaging. Lady Gaga have done well in term of selling her image to the public.

Today I had read an article on yahoo news. It is about using free Wi-Fi to log into Facebook and Twitter online. It also says that by using free Wi-Fi, your account will be very easy to hack into by others. The hacker can easily get you password and user name in order to change your personal profile or obtain personal information.

I believe after this news has been posted that it may affect the businesses which provide free Wi-Fi as one of the benefit, likes coffee shops with customers who want to have a cup of coffee while doing their works or students who have arranged to meet there to do their assignments, etc. Those are the people who may use the shop’s free Wi-Fi to go online. For example, Startbucks provides a nice environment for consumers who want to stop and stay around, and using their free internet is one of the benefits. But after such an article has been posted, some people might afraid that their personal information will be revealed to the public. So they might make their own coffee instead going to Startbucks to use the free internet while buying the coffee. Thus Startbucks may lose some consumers or they can spend some money to invest in better encryption; the value will be added on to each cup of coffee. But if you do not wish to pay for the extra services and want to save more money, the best way is to start make coffee yourself!