The previous marketing assignment ask our team to take a video to use the marketing concepts such as 4Ps , SWOT and STP to do the analysis for the company we chose and offer them with  effective recommendations.

When we see the instruction of the assignment. we decide to answer all the questions required and show our suggestions plans, and expectations for the company in the future. We also want to do it in a creative way and give all audiences an impression of a high-tech picture. We differentiate the works for each team members, and each people is responsible for a certain part .

However, some ideas in our mind is very difficult to be achieved in the reality. For example we want to show the difference among past, present and future smart phone market, but we found it was hard to show the future especially that we can not get a future Blackberry phone. Also i feel that we started the project not early enough so that we can not make the quality of the video perfectlt as we expected.

Holt Renfrew and Harry Rosen are regarded as the two biggest retailers in term of Luxury Clothing. The biggest difference between is that Holt Renfrew sell both men’s and women’s clothing but Harry Rosen only focus on men’s staffs. Another difference is that for men’s clothing Harry Rosen Target business people who are in about mid age as their main customers but Holt Renfrew have more designer’s brand for young people.

According to the consumer’s behaviour, females tend to be more likely to go shopping than males. When a couple go shopping together, there will be a greater chance that they go to Holt Renfrew rather than Harry Rosen. Although, both stores contains many same brands, consumers can hardly to find the same thing in each stores. i think it is the result of the Canadian culture.  Most banks, airline and communication companies avoid to compete with their competitors face to face.  They are always avoiding the direct competition and be too friendly to each other. As I know , there are only less than 10% of goods in common in Holt Renfrew and Harry Rosen. They are not trying their best to get an extra market share from each other. They are satisfied with their current market position.

lacking of competition is a serious problem in many industries in Canada. Several oligopoly companies dominate the market and leave consumers not many choices. This also means than they have a huge potential to improve their service and set a more reasonable price for consumers if there are some new powers entering the market.

•   After reading Ernest Li ‘s blog of “the brand Lexus” ，I start thinking about this kind of marketing strategy nowadays many car manufacturers are using. Especially for most Japanese car companies, for example Toyota created Lexus, Nissan created the Infiniti and Honda created the Acura.
•    In the marketing  class, we talked about the product mix and product line.  company can either choose to increase the product mix to increase  breadth or offer more product in each product line to increase the depth. However, The three Japanese car brands I mentioned above chose to use their market power to make  a new brand. As we know, Japanese car is famous because of its economical performance and relative cheap price for buying price and maintenance. With  the original brand, it is very difficult for them to gain the market share of luxury car market. People know these brands so well for so many years and  and the market segment that these companies target can not be transferred to be the potential consumers of luxury line very easily.
• For Toyota, Honda and Nissan, they have huge advantages over their companies who are new to the luxury car market. They have great experience on management, marketing and after sale services.
• Although Lexus, Infiniti and Acura still don’t have strong brand recognition in luxury car market as BBA( BMW, Benz,Audi), according to the sales performance in the previous year the gap between them and european is getting smaller and smaller.

In the North American and European auto market, manufacturers such as BMW, Mercedez, and Audi release their cars in regular wheelbase models. However, in Chinese market they not only release regular wheelbase models, but long- wheelbase models as well.

For examle,the long- wheelbase 3-series is taffy-pulled by 4.3 inches, with most if not all of the space apportioned to the rear seats, perfect for a land where BMW’s slogan might as well be the Ultimate Other People Driving Machine. (Chinese folks with the means prefer to be driven around, and this new model will join another China exclusive, a 5 -series in the country’s showrooms.) The long-wheelbase 3-series will be available in 320Li, the 328Li, and 335Li configurations. The latter two should feature the same engines we see in regular-length 328i and 335i: a 240-horse, 2.0-liter turbo four and a 300-hp, 3.0-liter turbocharged inline-six. The 320Li will use a less-powerful, 181-horse version of the turbo four. A regular-wheelbase ActiveHybrid 3 will make its official debut in Beijing, too, but will be sold globally.

The special long-wheel base edition cars  in Chinese market can satisfy Chinese buyers’ consumer-behaviour better and help each manufacturer to target a  more specific segment. These manufactures also sell the regular length car so that they have two similar products in the market which can attract consumers who have different requirements for the car. BMW has a strong brand image and technical support which allow them to keep the 50:50 golden-ratio to remain the center of the gravity of the car in the middle for long-wheelbase models.

In conclusion, in order to be successful in a foreign market, each brand should keep its traditional advantages and make some changes for different consumer behaviours. If the base of the potential consumers is large enough, the change is worth doing. last but not the least, companies which have strong brand image and higher reputation can perform well in a foreign market easier.

At the end of last month, search giant Google announced to sell Motorola smartphone phone business to Lenovo for $2.9 billions. Google bought Motorola with more than 12 billion in 2012,however,Motorola has lost nearly $2 billion since Google took over, while trimming its workforce from 20,000 to 3,800.

After taking over the Motorola, the share price of Lenovo fell by about 20% because people think the value of Motorola is overestimated which means Lenovo bought Motorola at a “bad price”.

From the marketing perspective, I don’t think Lenovo bought Motorola wrong. Lenovo didn’t have a global recognization before took over the IBM. Brand image is very important in a competitive market as Smartphone market and PC/laptop market. With the brand of Motorola, Lenovo will be able to immediately get a quite significant market share.

In addition, before Lenovo officially bought Motorola, there was also some news that Lenovo might buy BlackBerry. However that was finally stopped by Canadian government. BlackBerry is   famous with its reliable and secure system and its clients are mainly enterprise and government users. These years, when Chinese companies try to do some turnovers overseas, they  always meet this kind of this situation, just because they are “chinese companies”. This shows that it’s very important to be aware of Political rules before making a market decision.

For marketing, business ethics is given a more importance. Being honest and reliable is the marketing ethics. Marketing ethics is important because it is what makes business good at what they do. Without ethics in marketing, people would not have morals which may hurts company’s profits and all shareholders’ benefits as a result.

“The Gulf oil spill is recognized as the worst oil spill in U.S. history. Within days of the April 20, 2010 explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico that killed 11 people, remote underwater cameras revealed the BP pipe was leaking oil and gas on the ocean floor about 42 miles off the coast of Louisiana. By the time the well was capped on July 15, 2010 (87 days later), an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil had leaked into the Gulf.

The well is located 5,000 feet beneath the water’s surface in the vast frontier of the deep sea—a permanently dark environment, marked by constantly cold temperatures just above freezing and extremely high pressures,scientists divide the ocean into at least three zones and the deep ocean accounts for about three-quarters of Earth’s total ocean volume.

Immediately after the explosion, workers from BP and Transocean (owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig), and many government agencies tried to control the spread of the oil to beaches and other coastal ecosystems using floating booms to contain surface oil and chemical oil dispersants to break it down underwater. Additionally, numerous scientists and researchers descended upon the Gulf region to gather data. Researchers are still trying to understand the spill and its impact on marine life, the Gulf coast, and human communities.

3 years later, the Gulf is still not oil free.”

The news above is an example that shows that each business has the responsibility to be ethical in the market. For The energy companies like BP, the environmental hazard caused by them leads to huge loss in money and the stock price of BP fell down sharply(100 billion dollars loss in two month). In addition, BP has to pay the compensation of 20 billion dollars.

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