Do not chase greatness; let greatness chase you.
Meadows pharmacy is a compounding pharmacy that specializes in providing people with everything they need for their well-being. From prescription medicine to natural health alternatives, Meadows Pharmacy has it all. Their excellent customer service is renowned and they do everything possible to meet their customers’ needs!
Unlike other Sauder courses such as Accounting and Finance, Marketing is an area where collaboration and group-work certainly play a very large part in the learning process. Taking what we learn in lectures and directly being able to apply these tools to a real-world situation allows us to immediately practice this application, which solidifies our knowledge of the subject. Without a doubt, I feel like the group project portion of the course was the most important component and I also appreciated a deviation from the traditional presentation by way of the video project.
The division of the project into 3 components spread the work out quite evenly and eliminated students’ temptations to procrastinate on the work until the end of the semester. For me, the assignment was very clearly outlined but some people found the video portion quite frustrating as they had no prior experience with video-editing software. This also reduced the quality of some of the final output from groups. However, I believe this is a challenge that is worth presenting to students as this is a skill that will prove to be very beneficial, not only in future courses we take, but also when we enter into the workforce.
Overall, the project was very enjoyable as I was able to befriend all of the members of my group, which broke the ice quite nicely and allowed us to work very well throughout the semester. I had always wanted to take a course specific to a more abstract course such as Marketing, but had been unable to until now. This course has definitely changed my perspective and has definitely encouraged me to take other Marketing courses in the future!
Most people have probably seen this commercial by now, as it has been airing quite often on popular TV Channels recently:
But, interestingly enough, only after seeing that commercial for probably the 20th time in the past couple of weeks did I notice what Amazon’s main tactic was. Perhaps at first watch even you didn’t notice what I’m going to discuss. The speaker on the iPad Air’s side has a completely obvious British accent. Whereas the speaker on the side of the Amazon Kindle has a distinctly deeper voice with a truly “American” feel to it.
I was very surprised that I did not notice this immediately when I watched the commercial the first time as after noticing it and rewatching the commercial, it seemed so very obvious! However this is why this tactic intrigued me so much. I think, although I failed to catch the subtle reference myself, most other people must have picked up on that immediately. A very clever way to mock Jony Ive, Senior Vice President of Design at Apple who hails from Great Britain and is the mastermind behind most of Apple’s products.
British accents are, for the most part, just jokes here in North America, which makes Apple’s iPad Air seem almost laughable in comparison to the Kindle. The combination of the difference in voices, and comparison of specifications in which the Kindle has a lead is a very effective tool in communicating its value and capturing the audience’s attention.
I reflected on this commercial after realizing Amazon’s strategy and looked further into such commercials which target large tech giants and came across some by Microsoft as well. Seems to me as if the smaller companies are the only ones who face the need to showcase ads which have direct comparisons to the leading products. Amazon does this with Apple, and Microsoft does it with Google.
This post is in reply to Alyssa Leung’s post detailing sex in marketing through the example of GoDaddy’s recent Superbowl commercial:
The simple answer to her question is… yes. Sex has been perhaps the most predominant tool used in creative advertising over the past few decades. Especially since globalization has put the internet in the palms of every person’s hand and social media such as Facebook and Twitter have exploded. The fact remains that sex, by nature, catches our attention. Human beings, and all reproductive animals, are hard-wired to always want sex. It’s just the way of life.
In today’s age, marketing has become almost 100% about catching the audience’s attention and then flashing the message at the very end of the advertisement to convey the real message. As can be seen by GoDaddy’s ad, the steamy kissing between the two actors has literally nothing to do with Web Hosting, but since it catches the audience’s attention, the results of the Ad were outstanding.
So, no matter what (unless morally wrong), the concept of sex will remain the most commonly used tool in marketing. Period. No other single thing causes us to react more, and that’s just how it is. So the concept of “sexism in advertising” is some what societal more than moral. Obviously society, in general, has some reservations about accepting advertisements that contain outright sexist ideas, but most of the time those ideas are just formulated by speculation. Using the GoDaddy ad as an example once again, the kissing between the two actors is in no way a necessary sexist statement objectifying women. It is simply a tool to attract the audience’s attention, and to no surprise, it catches women’s attention just as much as men’s! This debate may not even stop raging, but the facts remain facts and the numbers speak for themselves.
Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and every other search engine in fact, use complicated and convoluted algorithms to rank websites in the order that they appear in search results when any user enters a search query. However, until very recently, there was a very fatal flaw in these algorithms. It seems obvious that a website should be ranked higher than others if it has a lot more content that is relevant to the search query. One of the main measures of this relevancy to the term that was searched, was keyword density and the HTML “meta” keywords tag. As more and more search engines emerged and started to become popular, they attracted millions of searches. In 2012, Google recorded a total of 1,873,910,000,000 searches. That’s a lot of commas.
Unquestionably, as search engines grow in popularity, the value of being at the top of specific searches became very enticing to businesses. This led to the establishment of a black-hat Search Engine Optimization world focused on creating strategies to help websites cheat their way to the top of search rankings. The most popular such website is http://www.blackhatworld.com/.
It became very normal to see websites making endless amounts of pages that contained only keywords and keyword-stuffed “meta” tags. This obvious spam led to unrelated spam websites ranking near the very top of Google. They knew something had to be changed.
Over the years, the Google search algorithm has become far more complicated than it once was and is now the internet giant’ secretly guarded recipe. Many more metrics are accounted for now, including incoming links to the website, social media presence and user trust in the website. However, the question still remains: has SPAM been eliminated?
With the stakes so high (billions of searches every single day), there is very large incentive for businesses to cheat their way to the top of Google’s rankings. One of these strategies include spam link-building in which the website collects millions of incoming links from completely spam websites that serve no other purpose. Having had experience in the industry this past summer during my internship, I can say that spam has definitely not been eliminated and the world of Search Engine Marketing is a rapidly changing one. As more and more people become dependent on search engines, I expect further amendments to these algorithms to root out spam and unwanted content.
Sources:
The weight-loss industry is estimated to be larger than $60 billion in the USA alone. With millions of people searching for healthier alternatives to fast and convenient foods such as pop, chips, and other snacks/beverages, this presents a large opportunity for companies like Coca-Cola.
Although Diet Coke, a product advertised to be calorie free, was released in 1982, it has only recently seen tremendous increases in sales volumes, paralleling the massive growth in the weight-loss industry. An alternative to Coca-Cola’s flagship Coke, this product is naturally very appealing to those looking for a product lower in sugar and calories… but there’s more to it than that.
What replaces sugar in these inherently sweet drinks are artificial sweeteners such as aspartame, cyclamates and saccharin. These substances are known to have caused cancer in laboratory animals and are continuously linked to cancer-related issues. Coca-Cola’s mass marketing of this product is a clear example of an ethical conflict in marketing.
Coca-Cola backed in famous Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld for a large marketing campaign promoting Diet Coke and Karl endorsed the drink, adding “everybody knows I drink Diet Coke and nothing else; night and day.”
A factor that Coca-Cola needs to consider in its advertising of the product is disclaimers that inform consumers of the potential risks associated with their product. If this is made mandatory for all pharmaceutical goods – having to disclaim all possible side effects of the product – then why is it not the case for another consumer good such as Diet Coke?
The marketing that is currently being conducted by Coca-Cola for this product is incomplete and misleading. Even though the artificial sweeteners that are being used in Diet Coke are backed by the FDA, more strict guidelines need to be set on the way Coca-Cola is allowed to market its Diet Coke product.
Sources:
http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/artificial-sweeteners
http://www.worldometers.info/weight-loss/
It’s no surprise that many kids from highschools all over BC, rather than pursue post secondary education, simply get on a train and head North to some rural area of Prince George where they can earn a very good living working as labour. Not only is it easy for highschool graduates, in fact there are apprenticeship programs in place in most highschools that allow students to work part time as they study so that after graduation they have work experience under their belt. This experience makes them very valuable in the labour market and they face no troubles finding jobs as soon as they graduate.
Well that’s just great!
…Actually, is it? This means more and more of our young are diverting themselves from going to post-secondary for 4 long years (I mean, who wants to study?) as they see the lure of money as soon as they graduate. Many are forced to leave their home due to family issues, at which point the only thing they care about is making money to support themselves. And studying costs money… and is… well, studying.
As this trend continues to grow, it will be very interesting to see how it affects our economy in the near future as much of the possible talent and brains are being sucked away by the labour market.
Coming into the course, I had varying expectations. From what the upper year students, who had taken the course last year, had told me, I was somewhat nervous about all the casework that we would have to do. They warned and said, even though there’s no final, there’s a lot of work and the cases will creep up on you if you don’t keep up to schedule.
This was all true, and I saw it right as the first individual case approached. Since then, I’ve been doing better with time management… somewhat. However, those struggles aside, the group project has been a very positive experience, contrary to my expectation. In highschool, group projects were often very short and not engaging. However, the Comm 101 group business plan project has managed to keep me interested and involved with the group for the most part of the semester.
Dividing the assignment into 3 parts allowed the group to gain lots of experience with working together and by the last assignment, we have confidence in each other and have communicated enough to be comfortable with each other. All my group members have been very solid, and I am very confident that we have tried as hard as we could and the results will reflect the hard work for sure.
Many fanboys and fangirls of Apple around the world simply follow the fact that “Apple has the largest market capitalization of any company in the world” so therefore they’re bigger and better than Google and everyone! The fact is, every company makes mistakes and is lacking in some aspects. One of these big mistakes Apple made was introducing its own maps application to the iPhone operating system to replace that of Google which is so well renowned across the world.
Above are just a couple of the very obvious and unmistakable errors that are seen in Apple’s new Maps application. As soon as news spread of this atrocious decision by Apple, Google pounced on the opportunity and is finishing up design of its own application which it will submit to the Apple Store very soon.
This is just another way that Google will assert its dominance on Apple (at least in the software market for sure). The Android operating system is also currently holding the lion’s share of the smartphone operating system market in contrast to Apple’s iOS which is limited to just the iPhone. Google’s decision to delve more into the software market has been very rewarding thus far, and it is extremely impressive to see that it has managed to compete with Apple in terms of market capitalization while remaining completely in the software market, whereas Apple has been in the hardware market for a long time.
Now, as Google also enters the hardware market for tech products, the competition gets even sharper. Who do you think will prevail?
Sources:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/google-prepping-iphone-maps-apps-report-says/2012/11/16/09592e3a-2ff4-11e2-a30e-5ca76eeec857_story.html
An acquaintance’s blog post on the topic of Profitable Passion struck a note with me and really led me on a thought-provoking journey revolving around my future and my peers’ futures.
Ever since entering Sauder, I’ve heard countless stories about my fellow classmates successfully leading their own business while in highschool (some even middle school). Stories that are awe-inspiring and truly characteristic of what a Sauder student really is: a passionate businessperson. I, myself, created and nurtured a Creative Design agency named Blue City Design throughout highschool, but since entering business school, I feel the need to be part of something bigger, something more lucrative.
The fact is, many of us enter business school thinking we’ll hit it off big as entrepreneurs and become the newest millionaire billionaires of the 21st century. But, the fact is, millions of people attend business school just in North America… how many become the next big thing? You got it… not many. But isn’t that what defines passion? Even while seeing the daunting obstacles ahead of us, a remorseless world waiting for us, we follow our dreams endlessly. We put everything on the line, in the hopes that we will one day, get that next big idea that’ll take us to where we want to be.
“Hope is a waking dream,” the great Aristotle said. “Go get it,” I say.
A big thanks to my acquaintance for leading me on such a journey!
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