When I reviewed Jacky’s Blog, I found an interesting topic — the pricing strategy of Best Buy. It is about that Best Buy now prices match against other retailer competitors’ price such as Future Shop, Memory Express and so on. So if a person go to Best Buy and see a product’s price is higher than that in other retailer stores, he can get the same price if he shows the evidence to the staff in Best Buy. The evidence can be the screenshot of the information on the main websites and a photo of the product’s price shown in the store.

In fact, this “pricing matching” strategy has been widely used before so if Best Buy just started to use this strategy, it is far behind its competitors. When I bought my computer, I went to a online shopping website http://www.shopbot.ca. This website can display a bunch of information such as the price of the computer, where I can buy the computer and who the seller is. You will not buy a computer from a stranger, all the information that the website provides to you is directly collected from authorized Canadian dealer. So when you look for the computer and arrange the information from a low price to a high price, you can easily see which retailer gives you the lowest price. A number of retailers have the price matching policy, however, Memory Express has more than that.

In order to attract more customers, Memory Express has a price beat guarantee. As the guarantee says, “Memory Express will beat any authorized Canadian retailers by 25% of the difference in price. It will beat any price both in sores and on website. It will beat any price up to 7 days after the purchase.” In addition, right now Memory Express will match the shipping price of its competitors.

More and more retailers engage in the more and more fierce price war, who has the laugh for the end of the race? Express Memory? Best Buy? Future Shop? or Customers?

Today I read an interesting blog “Scott Oelkers and Hatsune Miku, Together at Last in Crazy Video From Domino’s Japan” written by John Tejada. The bog is about a measure of promotion of pizza initiated by Domino, in which  Domino uses Hatsune Miku, a holographic avatar created for a “singing synthesizer application” from Crypton Future Media, as the stunt to promote its pizza among Japan.

I would say this is a great example about how a company create a specific tactic of promotion based on the local market. Pizza is one of the popular fast food in the world, but there are many alternatives of it such as hamburger, sandwich, hot dog and other form of fast food. So biggest question Domino is facing is: how could Domino differentiate its pizza in the relatively pure-competition fast food market? Japan is a country that highly value the anime industry. The anime of Japan is very popular and famous to both domestic   Japanese and foreigners in other countries.

As the table shows, the anime helps Japan make 207.1 billions RMB in 2005, which is equivalent to 34.52 billions in U.S dollar.

Therefore, recalling Japaneses’ passion to anime is a key to open the door of fast food market. I believe Domino’s promotion tactic will succeed for the following reasons: 1) the combination of mobile app and the theme of Hatsune Miku will improve the information searching experience for customers. When consumers use the adorable app to order pizza, they are easily in a happy mood so create a positive point of view to the Domino Pizza; 2) when people get the delivery, they are easily surprised by the packaging of Hatsune Miku and what effort Domino does for differentiating the products, which leads to a happy mood; 3) after customers finish the pizza, they can even play the mobile app, which further strengthens customers’ post-purchasing experience.

If I were a Japanese, I would buy that pizza, what about you?