I hope you liked that picture up there. Yes! Personally  I hate it when more than 7 commercials in a commercial break, it just annoys me don’t you agree?

Today we are going to look at what does “unacceptable ads” mean to Canadians. In this article from The Globe and Mail, it showed the surveys about unacceptable advertising in Canada. For me, I am not a Canadian but I think the unacceptable advertising should be the unrealistic awesome looking large hamburgers/ food in general. Because these advertisements raise our expectations of the product, but in the end when we go to the restaurant and the food don’t match up with our expectations is just an heartbreaking moment for me.

As the results showed in the article, not surprisingly political parties and candidates ads are the least costumers comfortable with the truth and accuracy. Because most of the time these parties would cover up some facts in order to create a better image for themselves to out beat other candidates. Furthermore, the type of media that is used to  advertise also affect how trustworthy is the advertisement. For example the ads that are on the newspaper can make you feel like its been “approved”, rather than ads that pop up on the internet which are just annoying.

Article from SUSAN KRASHINSKY – http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/industry-news/marketing/the-kinds-of-ads-that-irk-canadians-most/article21527109/

Comment on Eric Cui’s blog post – https://blogs.ubc.ca/ericcuicomm101/2014/11/11/comment-on-sweet-leaf-tea-blog-how-green-tea-can-help-you-lose-weight/

In the marketing perspective, trying the best to catch the attention from the possible consumers is understandable. However as we all know there are a lot of companies marketing their products through pseudosciences. What is pseudoscience? It’s a claim that mistakenly regarded as scientific. They would use words such as “proven” or “evidence shows” to make it sounds more “scientific”. And in reality, most of us are aware of this problem but still sometimes we would try the product just to “try it out”.

In Eric’s blog post, he mentioned about the Sweet Leaf Tea Company is promoting their products indirectly through the blog post about “Green Tea can help you lose Weight”. And in the blog post they talked about how Green Tea alone cannot help you lose weight . However, when these kind of advertisements come out on TV, they usually will only mention the exaggerated “losing weight in 20 days” claims and which  see it as misleading customers.

In my opinion, marketing strategies are important to launch the products into the market and raise awareness, but I don’t agree with using pseudoscientific claims on  the products. And as we all know, these kind of scientific-sounding advertisements will not make the products better.

Today, I am going to do my blog post by commenting on my classmate- Jocelyn Kwong’s blog post (https://blogs.ubc.ca/jocelynkwong/cream-of-the-crop/) about Sauder Alumni and what made them success. I believe many of us (first year students) are still confused and may not believe we have what it takes to be a Sauder alumni one day. But meeting the Alumni that day, made me reconsider why am I here, in Sauder.

I loved the presentation from Paul , the CEO of Tangoo, he showed the confidence that I am looking for throughout this course – COMM101. It is suggested for us to answer questions to get higher scores in class, and for myself I know there are lot of other classmates in the class has strong sense of commerce which dropped my confidence a lot. However, after seeing Paul’s confidence I started to think maybe I just need to do more preparation before class.

Another male Alumni came to us that day was Tom, the creator of Monarch Studios. I admire his “non-regretful” decisions, the fact that he chose to pursue what he thinks he wants the most showed a lot of courage. And I personally can never decide on something big, I take 10 minutes to decide what to have for lunch, and I am always afraid that I will regret afterwards. I would love to say I am a risk taker but at the same time I am contradicting myself.

In the end, this lady made my day. Jenny Duffy, she enlightened me.

When I was little I always think if there is superman then there can be a super woman, and until now, this is still my dream. I love dancing but this year, I questioned myself a lot since I don’t know if dancing is what I am good at or I can keep on doing it while I have so much school work to do. Jenny’s presentation showed me if this is what you want, you can do it no matter what it takes. I loved how she balanced her work and her choreography dream, although they take up all her time, still she isn’t going to give up either of them.

Having alumni coming in and show us what it takes to be on top really showed me what Sauder is about, how business can be combined with other pursuits and why we are doing this. Because this is the path that will train and lead us to the top.

This blog post on Business Insider actually contains a lot of different information about the “online market”/ the Tech industry which we as consumers are taking advantage of while the competition is getting hotter inside. And I would like to focus on how Cloud computing has changed the value of computer storage. As a teenager in 2014, I can barely remember my father calling this hard drive and it cost to store images and files when I was younger. But after 10 years, we are downloading songs and taking so many selfies and throwing them all into cloud storage. It is unbelievable how fast the Tech industry changes and grow, and even more is how fast the price of computing storage drop.

As more and more large companies joining the industry, supply increases in a high rate which lead to a big drop in price. It has been said by the CEO of the cloud storage company, “We see a future where storage is free and infinite.” I am not a big fan of seeing the price of cloud storage going to zero, since if the price is zero what will the market do or what will the consumers do? The “race” to zero is benefiting us,the consumers, a whole lot, and on the other hand the suppliers have to come up with their own point of different from other companies. I am really looking forward to see what these Tech companies are willing to offer so that this war of racing to zero will not defeat the market. 

External Blog post from: http://www.businessinsider.com/cloud-storage-race-to-zero-2014-11

After seeing this image, did you think it’s taken in a hotel room somehow? Then you would be wrong, it is actually a first class suite of The Singapore Airlines. From an article on Business Insider, it is mentioned that Eithad’s first class “Residence” is like an apartment in the sky. I have never had a chance to enjoy a trip in a first class suite, and I know how much the price is for flying just in the business class. But in the BI article, it says actually 70% revenue of  an airline  only come from 25% passengers on board. This surprised me, there are so many flyers on a flight but they are not the ones that make profits for the airline?

Recently, different airlines are improving their first class suites to compete with other airlines. Do you want a good sleep on the plane? We see so many advertisements on TV about the airlines’ business class; talking about how comfortable it can be and what can your “snack” be on a five hours flight. But we seldom realize that airlines are competing on the high end services and I can understand why they put so much investment on it especially on their first class suites, but at the same time I think the services for business class is still important to their company image.

External source : http://www.businessinsider.com/etihad-the-residence-sold-out-emirates-and-singapore-have-suites-2014-11

Do you know anyone that has a family business? What if no one in the family wants to take over the business when the older generation is ready to retire?

It is getting more popular that younger generation all have their own dreams or goal, they might not want to continue the family business. In this article, the Simpson family is going through the handover process of the business, and the father is planning to let the son who has more passion about doing business rather than passing it to the elder sister. In my opinion, this is a really reasonable decision unlike some of the traditional Chinese families just keep passing on their family business to their oldest son. I think the traditional Chinese way of passing the business on is not effective or it even lead to the decline of the business because the decision was irrational, not knowing what the children really want and blindly making him to take over the work.

In the article, it showed 33% of the family businesses don’t have a leadership succession plan, which may cause you a lot of trouble when the time comes. Because once the time has come, you will not have time to think through all the possibilities and who can be the one that you can trust and  pass the business on? “Do you want to run the process or do you want to be run by the process?” Hughes said in the article.

Source – http://www.canadianbusiness.com/insights/family-succession/

Article from Global news (Again 🙂

-http://globalnews.ca/news/1591433/sask-minimum-wage-increasing-by-20-cents-wednesday/

In many people eyes, minimum wages is not a big deal to them because they all have the “perfect job” that they want, they enjoy or they get well paid. However, in Saskatchewan, lot of the workers or employees are working their head off for the minimum wage. On Wednesday, the minimum wage will be increased to 10.20 by 20 cents. I have never had a job (getting paid), so I don’t know how big a difference would that 20 cents raise change those workers life, but in the article it mentioned, “If you want to have loyalty with your employees and you want them to have their time available to you, then you have to pay them what they’re worth,” said Lisa Wicklund, owner of Seed Sustainable Style on 13th Avenue in Regina. I agree with that statement, since the opportunity cost for these workers coming to work for you, they could have stayed home and took care of their kids by themselves instead of sending them to day care. And the reason they are willing to work for someone is that they believe working for you can help with their living standard. 

Minimum wages can mean so less to us, but also mean so much to others. “There isn’t much of a desire for people to put themselves into further poverty just to be working.”said Tyler Gray, HIV Strategy Housing Support Coordinator. 

Article from Global news

– http://globalnews.ca/news/1594639/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-tweets-about-d-shares-climb/

Apparently on October 3rd, Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted a picture of a vehicle peaking out of a garage that has a “D” on it and edited with the date Oct. 9 on it, which “made” the shares of Tesla Motors jumped almost 4 per cent on Thursday. Everyone are interested to see what new technology Tesla has got for their model S. Currently Tesla has only one model car is out in the market which is Model S, and at the same time they are developing two other models. Model X is coming out next year which will hopefully launches the company to another era since Model S has been out for a while, and Tesla is hoping to introduce their model 3 to the customers in 2017. Model 3 is the vehicle that Tesla will use to develop the lower class market, it will probably be half of the starting price of their luxury sedan.

Along with their new products/models, Tesla should be able to attract more new customers from different ages and expand their market. Not just fixed in the luxury part, if they really can lower the production cost more people will support and the shares of Tesla Motors should be even higher. Right now with Elon Musk’s tweet already caught everyone’s attention and hopefully that “something else” with the “D” will bring surprises to the market.

The tweet

Article from Global news

http://globalnews.ca/news/1588123/lower-wireless-bills-for-christmas-crtc-mulls-cheaper-rates/

This is the forth year that I am staying in Canada, I was in Alberta  where I decided I did not need a cell phone plan for high school since I was just in a tiny little town and mostly because the cellphone plan was just too expensive. And now I moved on and came to Vancouver for university, which means all the expenditures are even higher, should I get a cell phone plan? For an international students, the cost for studying oversea already is a pain that you will never want to look into and once again, the cell phone plans are way too high in Canada in my opinion (comparing from Hong Kong). In the article, Ian Grant, the principle analyst at telecom consultancy Sea Board Group said,”The hearings are focused on lowering costs for Canadian wireless customers ultimately”. 

Every time a costumer wanders out of the coverage zone of the providers , those small providers like Wind Mobile and Videotron in Quebe pay the big network owners — Rogers, Bell and Telus. The CRTC is trying to regulate and reduce those roaming rates substantially to assist the smaller carriers. This is a big decision no matter to the big 3 or the smaller providers or even us as the consumers,  there will be a competition between the big 3s and the new carrier if the new carrier can manage to expand their capacity on their networks in order to be comparable with others. Hopefully this big  decision will help calming down the price of cellphone plans.