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http://news.indiainfo.com/091021113041_man_sues_axe_as_unable_to_get_girl-478394.html

So what exactly constitute ethical advertising?

As I was doing assignment 4 for Axe promotional mix, I was surprised to know that Axe was sued because of the puffery used in its advertisement.

So should we believe in advertisement? All of us know that the advertisement contains puffery a lot of times. But if one company like Axe overuses it, which cause the man unable to get himself a girlfriend, is this ethical as well?

From textbook, it is okay to use puffery as long as it doesn’t bring harm to consumers. But is it okay to lie to consumers by exaggerating the effect of using the products? This is more like a food for thought for everyone. I am in opinion of the company should be responsible for what they say although they assume that everyone knows it is a puffery.

I know that I would be frustrated and agitated when the product doesn’t meet the expectation portrayed by the ad.

I was searching for the hotel rooms for my winter trip this coming December. As I read through promotion part, one of the promotion channel is product review. So how do you trust the reviews online?

The most obvious criterion that is objective is the price. I mean you can compare the price objectively unlike the experience of staying in the hotel. It must be good for value.

For reliable opinion, I asked my friends who have used the service before. But most of the time, we cannot find friends who have tried before due to our limited social network. This is perhaps known as word of mouth. Although travelling is one time product, hotels do need to offer good service to ensure their customers have pleasant stay.

Another alternative is the customer review of the website. I find this service is quite helpful because those reviews are the only available ‘trusted’ avenue to find whether the product is good. Of course some of them can be very extreme due to its subjectivity. But at least there are some constructive feedbacks. Also, some of the reviews can be faked by the company itself.

Definitely an independent body must be used to serve as intermediary. This is why I love tripadvisor.com. Generally, the feedbacks within the hotel website cannot be trusted because it is ‘filtered’ by the management. But having intermediary also means low regulations of the comments. For instance, company A can sabotage company B by writing bad comments.

So, in the end it is up to the customers to judge the hotel but generally the mechanism can be relied on as long as it is not abused by certain quarters.

An interesting video. Those with Iphone should see this

Apple did an awesome job in branding. This is also why its stock keep on rising.

This is product differentiation method which caused iphone to price above Htc although the features of Iphone might be inferior to Htc.

So if u were to ask any Malaysian what they miss the most, foods would definitely be on the list. Everyone would agree with this fact despite a lot of problems happening in the country. In fact, those who have left the country definitely cannot find the same thing in the country they leave for. Kueh Tiao, chicken rice, bak kut teh, char siew rice, nasi lemak, nyonya kueh, roti prata… and the list continues… It is due to the multicultural society which Malaysia is made up of, that we combine the best foods out of the three main races in Malaysia; Malay, Chinese and Indian

Yeah, again I would like to talk about the marketing mix of place of Malaysian foods. Yeah you can find a lot of Malaysians shops in  Vancouer.

First of all, most shops do not really give authentic food taste of Malaysian awesome foods. Second, they price really highly. It is kinda like specialty product for customers since those who really like the foods will go find it no matter how far it is. Maybe it is due to the cheaper rental outside which cause the sellers to locate somewhere not that strategic (the geographic location for me at least). Also, it might be due to the high food cost but then when I cook the foods myself, it wasn’t that expensive.

It might be due to the distribution intensity which the buyer purposely want to be selective or exclusive. But it is really difficult to get good Malaysian foods around. Anyhow, Malaysian foods are the best!

http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/malaysia/article/selangor-to-add-extra-day-to-no-plastic-bag-day-campaign/

The above link is the report of one of the states in Malaysia (yes, i m from Malaysia) going to add one more day to their no plastic bag campaign. It works exactly the same as in BC where people have to pay for the plastics bag if they didn’t bring their recycling bag with them on the no plastic bag day.

I believe that humans are always passive. They need to be forced or punished in order to do something. If the campaign is voluntary, seriously I don’t believe people would bring use recycling bag. This is human though. We tend to take things for granted. Like me, I tend use the plastic bag given by Safeway although I brought my recycling bag. This is mainly because I need to use the bags for my dustbin. So I am just being clean rather than not environmental friendly. Haha =).

But I brought the recycling bag with me when I am shopping at T n T. This is mainly because if not, I would be charged. Meanwhile, some of my friends are heckcare about it. Nonetheless, I think it is right for shopping complex impose fees for plastic bags to discourage plastic bag usage. I believe this is one of the concern to marketing as well as I realized there is marketing sustainability courses taught by Tamar too. I think is Comm 300 ish… Let’s preserve our environment!

Referring to Lin Xin’s blog https://blogs.ubc.ca/lxin/2010/10/24/we-do-our-shopping-so-differently/. It is very true that men and women shop differently. The summary of her post is that men tend to shop for for convenience goods/services while women tend to be shopping for goods/services despite the product sought being similar. One good can be different type of goods for consumers?  This is because the difference in perception. Men don’t think a lot before buying a product while women do.

The above indicates what most people would think. However, that is not very true. It depends on people although such stereotyping tends to be true. Probably for things like clothes etc, men don’t really care and they just go to buy the clothes they want. This is probably due to how they value the products. Different products have different value to people. People who valued it more will be towards shopping goods/services while people who value it less would regard it as convenience goods.

Sometimes, it is also due to the social factors. In Lin Xin’s blog, she mentioned that his housemate is reluctant to carry the groceries because it looks ‘unmanly. The typical perception in the society is that women do all the housework while men work outside. I once studied in SOCI 100 and this is prevalent in many societies. However, the trend are starting to change although not obvious. Men started to do some housework. It is also one of the elements in macro environment,  Social in CDSTEP.

Well, for me, my friends and I shop for groceries. We even bought a trolley to carry more groceries. Sound so housewife right? But no choice as trolley is definitely more convenient than carrying by hand. (I couldn’t care more about it as I can save more through cooking myself and the food definitely tastes better than outside! Haha.

As we have learnt before, place is one of the marketing mix out of the 4P. At the first look, you might think that it is not of any great importance and we always treat the presence of products for granted. Till I realise that Nestle’s breakfast cereals is not present in Vancouver or Canada in general, I find this P is so important.

My group mate posted an interesting post of great concern to me. So despite finishing my ‘quota’ of 1 post per week, I have decide to post another writing because of her relevant post to me. We are both the fans of Nestle Coco Crunch and Honey Stars. I seldom post picture in my blog but I just wanna prove it to everyone that I actually brought Honey star and Cococrunch back here (if u are wondering what they are, they are breakfast cereals)

I have always taken it for granted that there are those two products everywhere till I come here. There are few cereals that I am really interested in here. At most, I would take corn pop but that is not good enough comparison for Cococrunch and Honey Stars. I think Kellogs have probably dominated the market. One word of advice to Nestle would be to distribute those two awesome products here!! I have to fill in 3 quarter of my luggage for 9 packets of Cococrunch and Honey Stars considering they are not available in Vancouver. I would do the same next year too.

I have always wonder why wouldn’t Nestle distribute the products in Canada? They certainly have potential markets as from what I have realised, there are not much breakfast cereals options in Canada, at least Vancouver.

Today Tamer talked about company’s orientation. There are 4 types, sales, profit, competitor and customer orientation respectively.

I would like to give some examples and comment on each type of orientation.

Sales: It is mentioned in class that Starbucks are profit orientation so I guess Tim Hortons should be sales orientation. In fact, some of my friends find Tim Horton cheaper. But the trick lies on the size of their coffee. Primarily they are able to offer cheaper coffee because of their smaller portion of cup and meals. This gives the illusion that Tim Horton is quite cheap. Well, for moderate eater like me actually don’t find it fulfilling and worth value to eat Tim Horton. Well, this is a good strategy by Tim Horton. They sell their products cheaper but they are doing something with the size of coffee offered.

Profit orientation: I believe luxury restaurants are profit orientated. Especially those hot pots and expensive dine in place. They seek to maximize their profits. This sounds so economic actually! Haha. I know monopoly always do that. They sell less products but at higher price. Examples? Perhaps, expensive chocolates, Nike, iPhone. They always sell less than the market equilibrium!

Competitor orientated: Well, we always see about those price matches thing in Future shop, Best Buy and other big electronic shops like them. I wonder do they sell at the same price? The trick for them to have the price match thing is to sell different type of products. If Bestbuy only sells type A product (differentiated) which Future shop don’t sell, how are we as consumers going to compare the product price? A smart move right? If in economics, the price check (if you could find something the same with lower price) then they are willing to refund u. This is to keep other oligopoly from pricing above their agreed price.

Customer orientation: Well, I hate to admit it but Rogers is one of them (although I consider their phone service to be highly priced). They have a lot of packages offer to consumers. In econs, it is like price discrimination by segmenting your consumers to different groups then the supplier can maximize their producer surplus. They have different packages for different users, heavy users, students, business etc.

That’s all for now. So much economics in my blog. Maybe it is because of I got back the econ midterm today and finished my econ 355 midterm. Haha

I am here to talk about last lecture content, product life cycle.

One of the PLC which I want to talk about is Textbook. So it is basically affected by the content and most importantly the edition of the textbook. Well, UBC always changes new textbook edition every two years I think. This really cost burden to students and education is supposed to be something that benefit ppl but it is turned into profit organization. When new edition comes out the older edition enters the declining stage as some students still tend to use it. Then the new textbook turns into growth stage as well.

What about UBC university brand? Or its courses？ I believe it is in maturity stage as there is no significant growth of the number of students enter UBC. Well, it is due to its limited capacity as well.

Then there is the iphone. Again new product is always launched after the market become saturated. There will always be some ppl haunting for it once it comes out although it is of little difference.

I guess that’s all for now. Have a great weekend everyone!

Just wanna share some experience with everyone. I believe most people are currently doing the marketing assignment number 2. The method which I am using is online survey. So, in textbook it is mentioned that internet survey has higher response rate. However, I find the contrary is true.

Me and my group members have posted the survey on our profile page and there are only about 22 ppl responding out of the 1000 over friends that we have. To be frank, I think only those who are my ‘real’ and ‘close’ friends would go and do the survey, the rest find no incentive to do it. In chinese, we call that ‘guanxi’ relationship, which determine whether do people go and do the survey.

If I have done a paper survey, it would be much faster as people tend to do the survey for we ask them to do. Most importantly, they would feel bad for rejecting us. Haha.

That is why UBC always offer Starbucks giftcard etc for those who are doing the survey. But it is only the chance to win the card. Well, a good tactic to attract ‘materialistic’ people for me to do it but not tempting enough. In fact, the gift card company like Starbucks would gain as people tend to buy more than the value of the gift card as consumers assume they already earn the value of the giftcard!

So I would suggest prof Tamer to rebut the content of the textbook. Perhaps my blog post can be used as clarification. Haha =D

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