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Monthly Archives: November 2014

HMV: Time to Change

Christine Cheng’s blog post brings up an issue that is now faced by HMV. HMV relies hugely on the sales of CD, but today nobody is buying CD in the shops anymore. The growth of online music stores give customers more choices and sometimes save more money.

It is true that HMV can choose to follow the trend and enter the online market, but at the same time, it would be facing a high level of competition from Apple, Google and all other companies. In order to survive in this highly competitive market, it needs to create some unique selling points to differentiate it from others. For example, they can create a membership system, if people buy musics online, they can get points, and after they get certain amount of points, they can go to free concerts or get free music.

For the HMV stores, as Christine said, it should provide more physical products like posters or T-shirts, since now the people who buy actual CDs are usually fans, so HMV should consider to sell more fans’ products in order to gain more sales.

If United Nation was Fully Founded…?

The article “In a crowded market, entrepreneur finds a sweet way to stand out”

discussed about how Arc Initiative helps Ms. Tesfaye with her business’s development. It is good to see the business school students are using what they learned in classes to help the people in need. And this makes me wonder, what if the United Nations was fully funded? Will the problems still occur?

If United Nation is fully funded, a lot of things will probably be easier. Poor people will have enough resources for living, and their will be probably be less conflicts and wars…

But, is it possible for United Nation to help everyone in the world? People in different culture and social backgrounds are dealing with very different problems: education, health and so on. If United Nations wants to deal with everything, it needs to have huge amount of fund and a lot of people to work for it, which is almost impossible.

Frankly speaking, neither United Nation nor Social Enterprise should be the one to be responsible for the social problems happening nowadays. Scarcity of resources and social inequality will always exist, what we can do is to trying to help the poor people to get out of their situation. Therefore, it is good that some successful entrepreneurs are taking actions to help poor people and becoming social entrepreneurs.

Burger King Takeover Tim Hortons: Opportunity or Threat?

Yinuo Li’s blog post introduced an interesting topic about the merger of Burger King and Tim Hortons.

 

This merger is definitely a great opportunity for Tim Hortons to expand its business worldwide, especially when it has already saturated in Canada. And Tim was trying to develop in U.S for the past few years, but it was not a big success. With the help of Burger King, which has already been in the U.S market for 60 years, the path would be much easier.

 

However, even though Burger King promised that the value proposition will remain independent, Canadians still worry that their beloved Tim will become an ordinary U.S fast food restaurant.

 

After learning class 19- people, culture and teams, I got the idea the business culture reflects how people act in the business and their mindsets. It is very hard to let the business change its culture in a short term. 3G Capital, the owner of Burger King is more into cost- cutting and tight capital expenditure, but on the other hand, Tim’s success is mostly depends on its huge investment in developing new products. It would be difficult to find a way to fit both of them without changing their business cultures.

 

 

 

 

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