In response to Sara Salazar’s blog post about Starbucks’ expansion strategies in China to cater for their tastes, being lived in China for over ten years, I definitely agree that it is an area with great potential of business growth. This fast-developing country has an increase in consumers’ taste for Western foods and drinks, which attracted several companies. Even though China is far from being the largest coffee market, but it has a significant market growth of estimated 10-15% annually.

 Just as Sara had mentioned, Starbucks is facing a lot of competition, one of which is from Costa Coffee. This Britain coffee chain is also catching up with the expansion opportunity, by its tactic of opening as many stores close to Starbucks as possible. Almost all of Costa Coffee’s stores are beside Starbucks, creating direct competitions. Both chains are trying to expand into China with a significant fast pace and aims for high market share. It is then up to the point of differences that they provide, which differentiates them from one another, and is also why Starbucks are applying the new marketing strategies as blogged by Sara.

Sources:

http://www.china-briefing.com/news/2013/10/09/chinas-coffee-industry-is-brewing.html

http://www.worldcrunch.com/business-finance/coffee-wars-in-china-starbucks-vs.-costa/c2s4086/#.UomDWRYu6fQ

Levi Strauss & Company had recently launched their new line of clothing, the Wellthread Docker that combines sustainable design, workers’ well-beings and environmental practices.

Aiming to become the antithesis of disposable and fast fashion, Levi’s designs this new batch of clothing stressing its durability. Also, they anticipated the future rise of clothing recycling and developed a cotton material that recycles easily while maintaining strength. The Wellthread process consists specialized cold-water pigment dyeing that reduces water and energy consumption by around 30%. With piloting new approaches of programs to improve workers’ lives, the Wellthread clothing is exclusively made at one of the improvement pilot site.

These big changes in manufactures and designs of clothing can be tough, yet beneficial to the company. In this fast developing world where sustainability is highly viewed, initiatives such as the Wellthread can bring attentions to Levi’s. However, it is crucial for the company to market these clothing to convey its social and environmental well-beings. This leads me to question, will the consumers comprehend their effort? And ultimately, will consumers buy?

Sources:

http://www.triplepundit.com/2013/11/levis-develops-triple-bottom-line-khakis/

http://www.core77.com/blog/fashion_design/levis_wellthread_process_a_cheaper_more_sustainable_way_to_manufacture_clothing__25877.asp

http://www.environmentalleader.com/2013/11/08/levis-process-combines-sustainable-design-environmental-practices/

A logo is a crucial intangible asset of a company, and also an important aspect for marketing of the brand. In Brian Patrick Eha’s blog post, he organized five main keys to creating a successful logo:

1. Simplicity. A simple logo makes it easy for customer to digest.
2. Brand Consistency. Design should fit the company’s overall message.
3. Memorability. Put something different to make the logo easy to recall.
4. Remarkability. Create what makes it “worthy of remark”.
5. Market Testing. Do market research to ensure its suitability.

 These are useful tips to keep in mind while designing a logo. I find logo designing very amusing as it creates a direct visual representation of the brand, being the “face” of the brand, while creativity can be widely explored. A successful logo should embed all the above points, which assists the brand in creating brand awareness and loyalty.

Several logos have gone through evolutions to be improved, and can be analyzed through the five key points. For example, Shell’s logo is clearly modified to gain simplicity, while Apple’s logo gone from the rainbow colors associating free and easygoing to the futuristic appearance connected to its current tech giant position, adhering to the brand consistency.

Source:

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/227017

As Julie Jeehye Park mentioned in her blog post it is important to have good relationships with the employees, and also to retain them through motivations.  This can be evident through the company of Pixar as an example. Similar to Zappos as discussed in class, Pixar provides a very interactive workplace that highly encourages creativity from workers, which shapes its corporate culture and acts as a key element to its success.

Inside the Pixar Animation Studios, you will find the 24-hour cereal bar, the Pizza Room, a Breathing Room for yogic meditation, a fitness center, along with live performances, aerobics sessions and various self-improvement classes. Just like a theme park, Pixar characters are everywhere, such as the full-sized figures of Sulley and Mike from Monsters University in the foyer. This headquarters is designed so that it “promoted encounters and unplanned collaborations”¹, as wanted by Steve Jobs.

These definitely foster the workers’ relationships and create great motivations with low absenteeism and staff turnover, in which “most people never leave here”², said Oakley an employee. It is very impressive how they shape the job into a lifestyle to retain employees and ignite creativity and imagination.

Take a look inside the Pixar studios here!

Sources:

^1&2 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/10144531/Monsters-University-whats-it-like-to-work-at-Pixar.html

http://human.ly/knowledgebase/pixars-company-culture/

Debbie Brown had launched a mobile gym, Adventure Bus Inc, by purchasing a 72-seat school bus and retrofitting it into a mobile gym that caters for children. The bus contains facilities such as monkey bars and rock-climbing wall, with specially designed fitness activities. Ms. Brown started up as an entrepreneur by researching the concept from other countries and bringing it into Canada. With strong word-of-mouth advertising, the business venture has been a success, having growing popularity in birthday, school and community events.

However, Ms. Brown is now unable to catch up with the increasing demand and needs to purchase a second bus. But funding is a major problem, especially along with her unwillingness to partner up and constraints to having official loans due to her draining personal finances.

I think that this entrepreneurship presents a very interesting and innovative idea. However, it is essential for Ms. Brown to solve her funding problem in order for the business to further expand. Various suggestions have been proposed, of which I think microloans from family and friends would be viable, where she would be able to pay the debt easily with less financial stress. Also, working with parent volunteers instead of paid staff would be beneficial in cutting costs and creating better relationships with the community.

Sources:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/small-business/sb-growth/the-challenge/in-pictures-entrepreneur-trying-to-save-her-school-bus-turned-gym/article15389797/

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/small-business/sb-growth/the-challenge/her-business-a-gym-inside-a-school-bus-hit-a-bump/article15387183/

Google is undergoing the process of developing several new projects, but they are still mainly concerned about increasing the profitability in the two areas that dominants the usage market but makes relatively small amount of money: the smartphones and YouTube. Google has invested heavily in the Android system, and is currently trying to improve its search algorithms to cater for the wide range of consumers that uses smartphones as their primary search tool. While with YouTube, Google is also working to make it more mobile friendly, and expanded the paid channel for audiences to pay directly to watch content from certain producers.

Being the tech giant, I think that Google is a great example of how technology is embedded into business. As discussed in class previously, innovation is a significant aspect of technology and this is also what Google have been working on. It is experimenting on a few futuristic and high-risk projects, such as the self-driving cars, Google Glass the “wearable computer”, the WiFi balloons that beam Internet signals to remote areas, and Calico the newest research house specializing cellular causes and effects of aging. Even though these ventures seems to need a lot of years of development and experimentation, but I am sure that successful results will redefine technology and create another milestone for Google.

Source:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/international-business/us-business/google-seven-new-frontiers/article15096563/

Suhail Rizvi. You may be asking, “Who is that?” just as I do, and you most probably couldn’t even search him up because this mysterious man employs a person to clear his Wikipedia entry and his pictures from the Internet. So who exactly is him? Rizvi, the founder of New York private equity form Rizvi Transverse Management, will be one of the biggest winners from Twitter going public in the following weeks. With the previous mention of a company going public from private with providing the IPO during last class, I found this news related and interesting.

The 47 year-old financier had quietly invested in Twitter with a 15% stake at a cost of $1 billion. These shares are known to be distributed among several other investors, but any other details such as the size of Rizvi’s personal stake are not disclosed. Other than Twitter, Rizvi had been active in matchmaking private investors with the microblogging site; before that, he was focused on deals of Hollywood that includes buying and selling the film studio behind the “Twilight” series.

Despite keeping in his low profile, Rizvi is “not to be underestimated. His approach to traditional media as well as technology has put him in a great position,” as said by Jeremy Zimmer from a competitor company of ICM, an agency Rizvi had dealt with.

Source:

http://ibnlive.in.com/news/suhail-rizvi-poised-to-score-big-with-twitter-ipo/426508-11.html

“Everyone is doing pumpkin this fall”, said Gordon, a restaurant franchisee advisor from a consulting group.¹ Starbucks’ seasonal product pumpkin spice lattes had been introduced for ten years till now, and has been favored by the customers. The fact that it is only available for a limited period of time raises its demand.

This fall, McDonald’s is catching up with the seasonal coffee market and will be launching the product of McCafe pumpkin latte that costs almost half of that of Starbucks’. McDonald’s targets at Starbucks’ crowd, hoping to lure the customers into purchasing its pumpkin spice latte and grab some of the success through imitation.

McDonald’s is not the only one going with the pumpkin trend. Tim Hortons, Dunkin’ Donuts and Krispy Kreme also joins the craze of the pumpkin seasonal marketing. However, the success of these imitations is not ensured, as consumers are given a greater choice with various substitute products; this tests Starbucks’ brand loyalty especially in its pumpkin latte. What will be the consumer’s preferences? And will the popularity of pumpkin continue?

Sources:

¹http://business.financialpost.com/2013/09/24/mcdonalds-pumpkin-spice-lattes-target-starbucks-crowd/

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/industry-news/marketing/falls-secret-ingredient-for-drink-sales-pumpkin/article14196595/

http://www.nasdaq.com/article/can-mcdonalds-pumpkin-spice-latte-burger-kings-satisfries-and-other-copy-cats-compete-cm281688

Recently, BlackBerry is again hit by trouble with its investors. The company was sued by one of its shareholders, accusing a mislead in the state of the company’s future with its BlackBerry 10 smartphone line. Instead of noting the investors in BlackBerry 10’s actual performance in the market, they claimed the company to be “progressing on its financial and operational commitments.”¹ This paints a misleading positive picture of the company and is considered to be deceiving, since “in reality, The BlackBerry 10 was not well-received by the market,”² as stated by the lawsuit. There was even a layoff of around 40 percent of its total workforce.

All shareholders who bought BlackBerry’s stock from Sept 27^th 2012 to Sept 20^th 2013, a period in which the company’s state was misrepresented, were to be represented by this class action suit. It was until Sept 20^th this year that BlackBerry finally discloses its loss and layoffs, which undoubtedly resulted in a significant fall of its share price.

With the rise of touch screen smartphones, BlackBerry is consistently challenged and troubled with innovating differentiable products that attract the market. Along with the unwillingness to reveal its undesirable performance, BlackBerry is failing to adapt.

Sources:

¹ http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/blackberry-hit-with-shareholder-lawsuit-1.1913852

² http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/blackberry-hit-with-securities-shareholder-class-action/article14713440/

With the tragic incident of collapsed garment factories that killed over 1,100 people in Bangladesh, retailers are reconsidering the importance of the safety and working conditions for workers in factories. Pressures are also being put to improve the working environment of factories in Bangladesh. After the incident, the giant retail Walmart released a list of factories that it has barred from producing its garments due to concerns of safety and violation issues, however later finding out that there are still productions from two of the listed manufacturers. Records of shipments from the banned and blacklisted Bangladesh factories Mars Apparels and Simco Dresses were present.

Questions start to arise regarding ethical concerns of Walmart for ensuring the safety and well being of the factory workers. Other than focusing on products, retailers should also consider the appropriateness of the process in which goods are produced. It is Walmart’s responsibility to stop its use of labours working under an unsafe environment. In addition, ethical issue also arises regarding the inconsistencies of Walmart’s published information about banning certain factories and its actual continuous shipments with those factories. Businesses should be careful about the ethical implications to the actions, as ethics are now being viewed as an important topic by the society and mistakes could generate loss of reputation that would have a massive impact.

Source: http://www.propublica.org/article/walmart-accepted-clothing-from-banned-bangladesh-factories