Recently, I read an article written by jacgy&cynthia about “Create Wonder and Share Joy with Favorite Seasonal traditions” 2013 Christmas Starbucks promotion from 6 November 2013 ~ 6 January 2014.

They provide various kinds of products, includes three different flavors cakes and several kinds of coffee. Besides, they also have new beverage tasting counter, card and planner counter, 60 design of cups for people to chose during holidays and the last thing is to take photos.

Starbucks uses holiday to attract consumers and expand its market. It is a successful strategy to help company keep contact with customer. It’s a great chance for consumers to have a deeply understanding of new products and closing distance between each other.

Last but not least, realizing how important month-to-month is, Starbucks spread its new products by encouraging famous people to post blogs about this experience, which is an efficient method due to its low cost and pleasant experience. More people will pay attention to this product because their friends share happiness about it. By doing this, Starbucks not only spread its culture but also does an advertisement.

A blog I found about decreasing in PC shipments around the world written by Tina Tsai was quite a shock to me. People starts to pay attention to notebooks and tablets rather than PC computers compared to several years ago.

As Tina had stated that “When faced with the decision between tablets and PC’s, by comparing the advantages each device provides, consumers will be more attracted by the tablets, hence causing the decline of PC’s.” Indeed, with similar functions, most consumers will chose to buy tablets instead of PC’s due to its low price and grace appearance. Meanwhile, notebook such as macbook and air, not only have the same function of PC but also more convenient.

However, as for my own perspectives, lack of innovation is one of the reasons why PC industry suffers such dilemma. Specifically, we are already in an information and technology ear, if PCs not change themselves, the last thing that we cannot deny for them is disappearing. Moreover, PC has to open a new area by finding another consumer market and redefining self value.

A blog writes the competition between  pepsi and coke caught my attention when I browsing through the blog of xinyue li‘s blog.

She thinks it is a negative comparative advertising that two companies have been using manipulation and comparison advertising in recent television commercials in order to draw attention from a competitor’s brand to their own. She also think that PepsiCo commercial clearly overshadows Coca-Cola’s popularity in children in that commercial, giving it a connotation by letting the boy walked away without the coca cola.

Company competition is quite general in intense society. However, the war between pepsi and coca is especially well-known. I saw this advertisement video mentioned in her blog several weeks ago in class. Instead of feeling fierce and unethical atmosphere, I experience the power of creativity.

Undoubtedly, it is impolite  to disparage competitors, but they also become cooperators through method. From my own point, I don’t think it reference to ethical problem. For one thing, they doesn’t  involve in being illegal, for another, the interesting competition  between them not only promotes their brand names to some extent, which she mentioned at last but also increase their productivity. It’s a win-win strategy behind their competition.

“On Tuesday, Burger King introduced its latest menu offering: the Big King The alpha male product is bigger than the whopper and is a way of giving meat lovers what they want, while also giving a noogie to McDonald’s.”

Since Burger King  introduce his new product, which is quite similar like Big mac. An increasing number of people starts to compare with each other from taste to smell.

Although they look like quite similar, I think they target different consumer segments. Specifically, as for big mac, it has big size but costs more ($3.89) while burger king also has big size with a  bitter lower price ($3.79). Comparing with other hamburgers, such as subway hamburger and kfc hamburger, they can satisfy more utility of consumers with their big size.

Some consumers complain that The Big Mac is much more moist than the Burger King version, which was dry and altogether less appetizing and three layers of bread, two burgers, sloppy sauce and stringy onions make for a messy mouthful. All in all, burger king should  emphasize its differentiation  between  big mac. Otherwise, with only $0.10 lower price than McDonnell’s, it can not make a huge progress on selling burger king because Mcdonnell’s has higher recognition among consumers.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2503552/All-hail-Big-King-MailOnline-taste-tests-Burger-Kings-answer-McDonalds-Big-Mac-dont-to.html

Although all the people understand that sustainability is the capacity to endure, losing  short-term benefit, few of them will implement it. However, non-sustainability will cause a loss of long run interest, leading them to vicious cycle.

As one of the entrepreneurs that lay emphasis on sustainability, HM comes up with an idea that combine fast fashion with sustainability.Clothes that are in poor condition are either converted for other use, such as cleaning cloths, or recycled into textile fibers. Undoubtedly, H&M’s recycling scheme is a step in the right direction

Another activity HM hold is training staffs in order to raise the awareness of fire safety. It teamed up with 18 other brands and employer associations in the sector, BGMEA and BKMEA, to spread this  training not only in their some 200 supplier factories, but across the entire industry.Together with the Fire Defense and Civil Department, HM have also conducted five factory  assessments on fire safety, involving the factories’ worker representatives.

I think this activity have shown that a continued increase in awareness about fire safety is needed and we hope that the continuation of related training programmes will help to address this issue with stronger impact.

http://about.hm.com/en/About/Sustainability/Reporting-and-Resources/Case-Studies/fire-safety-in-bangladesh.html

http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/h-and-m-fashion-sustainability-mix

“A Chinese state-run newspaper blasted Starbucks for “profiteering” in the mainland raising concerns that the world’s largest café-chain could become the next prominent foreign company to be targeted by state media.”

Considering average income in mainland was considerably low, not surprisingly, The Economic Information Daily, a newspaper run by the official Xinhua news agency chastised Starbucks for selling its coffee at a extremely high price and having low cost performance compared to other coffee stores in China.

Why people in china still buying Starbucks blindly even if the price of coffee is 80% higher than that in US? I think the popularity of culture in Starbucks should never be ignored. From the required reading “happy feet” in class 19, it is noticeable that  organizational culture and human resources management enable companies to effectively serve customer so that raise the frame of a company.

Moreover, the thought that goods come from abroad are famous and special being taken for granted by Chinese people. They chase brand blindly and show off by taking photos and posting blogs if they buy a cup of coffee. All the things result in increasing rising price of Starbucks in China.

Amazon.com will invest in three new logistics centers in Poland, creating 6,000 new jobs over the next two years as part of expansion in Europe.The Amazon spokesman said on Monday there were no plans to shut existing logistics centers in Europe and that Amazon was about to open a new site outside Berlin that would create 1,000 permanent jobs.

Before making this decision, a SWOT diagram is useful to determine the value of opening a new site. There are both internal and external analysis.strength: 1.Amazon has high reputation among customers 2. it has a strong brand name. Weakness: 1.expensive cost structure. Opportunity: 1. more job opportunities. (6,000 permanent employees in three new logistics centers in Poland to build capacity) 2.unfilled costumer need (especially for women) Threat: 1.increased international trade barriers.

All in all, in order to expand market, Amazon should matching firm’s resources and capabilities to the competitive environment. Besides, they have to enhance the development of the company, absorbing new blood.

citation

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/amazon-invest-logistics-centres-poland-154041952–finance.html

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-07/amazon-to-create-6-000-jobs-in-poland-in-three-logistics-centers.html

class2 marketing meets accounting

http://www.quickmba.com/strategy/swot/

Blackberry recently encounter tough situation, facing class action shareholder lawsuit in U.S. Shareholder claiming that the company misled investors about its future, including how the BlackBerry 10 smartphone line would fare against competitors. As a consequence, the recent tumble in BlackBerry stock was a direct fallout from the executives’ misrepresentation of BlackBerry’s financial state.

From my point, the reason why blackberry gets into such situation is mainly due to the business fraud. Normally, there are three factors that appear to be present in financial statement fraud, which are an apparent situational pressure ( the intensity competition among tech market and the powerful rivals, such as Apple and Samsung).Perceived opportunity (pressure from the outstanding achievement before and along with the perception that they can get away with it), and rationalization (a ability to convince themselves ).

Hence, with overloaded information and rapid technology speed in society. Blackberry is supposed to meet individuals’  needs and  improve the technology rather than misrepresent the true situation of this company.

citation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/blackberry-faces-class-action-shareholder-164233141.html;_ylt=A2KJjaj2VFNS90sAyOPwFAx.

class 9 financial accounting

https://www.cga-pdnet.org/Non_VerifiableProducts/ArticlePublication/FinStatFraud/FinStatFraud_p1.pdf

IPhone 5c faces awkward situation in tech market. Although this phone meets a lot of request consumers have wanted for a long time such as a choice of colors ( they add different beautiful colors)  and a lower price point (only $50), but at this point of mobile development, it makes such a small difference. The average consumer doesn’t care about clock speeds, core numbers or any of that techy jargon that the majority of them don’t even understand. They want a phone that works well, looks good and perhaps shows a slight symbol of status. Almost all the products in Apple store can achieve such goals. But why they have to choose iphone5c?

Here is a perceptual map below.

It is obvious  that iPhone5c does not have high competition with other products. Most consumers chose to buy iPhone5s rather than iPhone5c despite iPhone5c have cute colors that welcomed by women. They may what to enter women field, but they ignore that most women will prefer to buy headphone case, which is the reason why iPhone5s is not that popular around the entire world.

citation:

http://www.i4u.com/2013/10/56167/iphone-5c-now-available-just-45#oGOszb5hefW1dhx3.99

class8 brand positioning and value proposition

http://corp.kaltura.com/Products/Features/Video-Management

As we can see, business ethical problem is getting more serious today. Sanlu used to be one of the most biggest milk powder company in China. With the explosion of the scandal, a large number of people start to consider the importance of moral in market.

In my view, sanlu uses melamine because of its large profit. Hence, we can find  that most moral problems related to money. In order to make huge money, companies have courage to break the law, even not care whether it will damage people’s health. In a word, they are driven by the profit.

It’s a large project if we want to solve this problem. The only thing we can do is to spread the disadvantages of ignoring the ethical problem. Besides, public, media and government have to put pressure to company so as to decrease the frequency of making mistake. Moreover, some measures should be taken to curb this trend, such as making law.

If enterprise whats to success in its filed, they must obey the rules in market, which means they can’t make plans against ethical.

citation

http://www.economist.com/node/12262271

class3 business ethics

http://site.ebrary.com/lib/ubc/docDetail.action?docID=10187339&page=171