Yanqi Wang’s blog talks about IKEA, the world largest furniture retailer, has purchased a 46-megawatt wind farm in Pincher Creek, Alberta, which is expected to generate twice the total energy consumption of its stores across Canada. Yanqi thinks IKEA’s action is win-win to itself and its customers because it reduce the cost of company’s operation and insures IKEA keep providing high-quality furnitures with a relative lower price to customers. I think it is a win-win decision in the long-run, but it will burden the company’s financial performance and may increase the furniture in a short run since the wind power equipments cost a lot to install. IKEA may increase the price of its goods to recover the expense in purchasing wind power equipments in a short run. Yanqi also belived that both government and business should take social responsibilty and make contribute in environment protection. I agree with her, either government or business should get involved in solving social problems which are not only for current profit but also fight for obtaining further development oppertunities. Governments and business operators should consider our next generation, so they should paticipate into taking social responsibility.

https://blogs.ubc.ca/yanqiiwang/2013/11/16/ikea-eyes-low-carbon-future/

I read Is Bottom Line Everything which is the blog of Wayne Lau. He talked about entrepreneurs are trying to solve social problems such as world hunger and environmental problem. People questioned the exist of innovation and entrepreneurship which purely for social benifits.Wayne Lau belived eventhough business are not started with a pure mission to help solving social problems, they do hope to help people as a side effect. I agree with him, I personally belive that taking social responsibily and making profits help each instead of conflict to each other. Profits can be used to help solving social problems. Companies can build good brand reputation by helping solve social issues and thereby make more profits. Just as I mentioned in previous blog about Coca-Cola case which Coca-Cola has hired and trained many women to help them started carreer and more than that to help them finding their social values and estanblished positive life attitudes. We should appreciate entrepreneurs want to help with social problems instead of questioning their pupose. Coca-Cola make profits by doing it, but Coca-Cola also changed people’s life and brought them hope.  Besides, entrepreneurs’ enthusiasm of charity will also encourage their and their companies’ brand follows to get involved in the charity. Business take action into charity is win win.

https://blogs.ubc.ca/waynelau/2013/11/17/is-bottom-line-everything/

Overseas Marketers’ Real Problem In The Chinese Consumer Market

The article from Forbes discussed about the barriers for foreign companies occupy the Chinese market. Undeniably, China’s customer market has been a popular cake among overseas companies within extraordinarily increasing economic development of China. However it isn’t easy to win the minds of Chinese customs. The article gives several reasons. First, even though China has large customer base, customers are more capricious, diverse. Second, they face furious competition from local companies.

As a Chinese, I agree with it. Labor and raw material cost are cheaper in China than that of western countries because of exchange rate and other factors. Products of local companies are much cheaper compare to famous global marketers. Even though the quantity and design of local products are not as good as that of global companies, they are still acceptable. For Chinese customers who become richer in recent years, price is still the first consideration. In China, people like try new things but the enthusiasm will fade away as time went on. For example, KFC which was pretty popular when they first enter Chinese market, people had to wait for more than 30 mins in line for meals. But only few years later, KFC are not as poplar as before. They have to launch new products and use promotions to attract customers. In remote areas, overseas companies can not approach since their high price and customers local tastes.

In order to get higher market share in China, overseas companies have to modified their products to cater the taste of Chinese. If they can’t get advantage of price, companies’ target customer will be narrow.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/panosmourdoukoutas/2013/09/28/overseas-marketers-real-problem-in-the-chinese-consumer-market/2/

The U.S. Department of Justice is looking to get $848 million out of Bank of America liable because of defrauding Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac when its Countrywide unit sold it bad mortgages. The BofA case was brought by US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, who claimed the bank’s Countrywide unit created a program dubbed the “Hustle” to push through defective home loans then sold them to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The verdict is a win for the US government as this is one of the few cases stemming from the financial crisis that it’s taken to trial.

Companies should follow the rules and ethics requirements. Obviously, Bank of America cheated public for itself of interest. These actions leaded the financial crisis which hurt the economy and bank itself as well. Company will lost trust from its customers if they violate marketing ethical and laws. Company’s reputation will be hurt as a result company will lose its long-term profit and even bankrupt because of its fraud for short-term interest. Business ethics is very important for firms future development.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/halahtouryalai/2013/10/23/us-govt-takes-bank-of-america-to-court-and-wins-jury-finds-countrywide-guilty-of-fraud/#01393d

Wechat (English Version)

Facebook is the biggest social network in the world but China’s internet juggernaut Tencent is on its way to No. 1, WorldofCEOs founder Steve Tappin wrote in a LinkedIn post on November 5^th 2013. Tencent owns QQ which brings text, voice, and video messaging, online gaming and music, and share sites platform together, and Tencent also owns WeChat which is a mobile chat app. These will be Tencent’s points of differences and make increase competition power. Compare to Facebook, Tencent has another advantage. Tencent started its user base in China where has more than 1 billion three hundred million people. Besides, because of legal issues, Facebook is banned in main land China, but Tencent’s product can be used all over the world. However, in my opinion lower brand reputation in the world compare to Facebook is a huge obstacle for Tencent to be NO. 1. Facebook is well known in the world for decades, but Tencent is a national company which does not have good international user base and reputation as Facebook. In the other word, although Tencent and Facebook both have huge amount of users, Tencent’s user channel are much narrower. It will take a while for Tencent to build its brand in the world range. In addition since Tencent and Facebook’s real customer are advertisers not users, Facebook will make more profit and successful in next few years.

https://blogs.ubc.ca/zhao59/2013/11/17/chinas-tencent-about-to-overtake-facebook/

By 2020, The Coca-Cola Company will have empowered 5 million women entrepreneurs throughout our global business, driving business success and transforming millions of lives.

Video link http://www.ted.com/pages/sponsors_cocacola_company

It tells how three women’s life changed because of business associated with Coca-Cola company in the video. Business is not only about making profit, but also do take social responsibility. In tradition views, women are not independent and thereby they always could not receive enough respects and freedom. In the video, three women are not only earned money to assist their family but also respected by others, and inspired and helped others by having business with  Coca-Cola. They received career training from Coca-Cola and find the value of themselves from the career. Without Coca-Cola’s help, they may still the house wives who have low status and respect in the family and society.

Even though Coca-Cola’s primary purpose is making profit instead of  helping women finding their values and improving their living standard, Coca-Cola does changed many people’s fate and gave them hopes. In my opinion, taking social responsibility and  making profits are not conflict to each other for business. They are closed friends. Taking social responsibility will bring more profits to the company and profits can be used to solve social problem, taking more and better social responsibility.

Early November Ebermsan, chief financial officer of Facebook, confirmed that users are becoming less active. As the largest social network in the world, Facebook is losing users because of mobile chat services and photo-sharing apps, such as WeChat, instagram and Snapchat. Ebermsan referred data of usage number from first to third quarters of 2013 which the total number of active teenager users in 30 countries dropped by 20%.

“There is a very clear story with the big winners being closed messaging and video-and-photo sharing apps,” said TomSmith, CEO of GlobalWebIndex. “This is something that could be particularly harmful to Facebook because its core value lies in peer-to-peer community, messaging and photo sharing, but has less of an impact on Twitter because Twitter plays a greater role in accessing real-time news, interacting with TV or following celebrities.”

The article mentioned about WeChat, Chinese messaging platform with both Chinese and English versions, saw an extraordinary rapid growth about 1,021% of active teenager users between the first and second quarter even though most of its growth came from Chinese Communities.

In my opinion, the decreased users of Facebook are reasonable. I use both Facebook and WeChat. I personally prefer WeChat because it is more convenient and easy use than Facebook. It is a very small app which users can contact their friends in either voice message or text message, share your moments anytime, and check emails, which users can not do on Facebook website at the same time.

The change of customers’ preference in mobile service drives the change of composition of Facebook as well, and we can indicate it by its large growth in mobile app which up to 69%.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2013/11/12/heres-where-teens-are-going-instead-of-facebook/

Melinda Gates has been to many developing countries where people have no electricity, no running water, nearly nothing. In surprise, they do have Coca-cola which can be found every where even the remotest places . Melinda spent times study Coca-cola and pointed out three things which make Coca-cola successful. First, they take real time data and immediately feed it back into product so that they can identify the problem in time. Second, they tap into local entrepreneurial talent to reach remote places and neighbors. Third, they do incrediable marketing which associated their products with an ideal life.

I don’t know about the data advantage which Coca-cola has, but I do agree with the other two opinions. In China, there are a lot of villiges which don’t have high way and hard to enter. People who live in the village can also buy the Coca-cola in the corner stores in the village. Instead of selling their product into big supermarkets as they usually do in cities, they use a resell model which allowed them to bulid many small selling spots all over the remote places. Besides, Coca-cola also take a very local approach. They design the out looking based on the local popularity trend. For example, they designed the Coca-cola cans with Chinese Fuwa during the Beijing Olympics 2008, and they also lanched Coca-cola which in the bottles with different network catchwords. These products do attract many people to buy and even collect them. In my opinion, taking a local approach is one of  the secreats of success for many global companies. Take Mcdonal’s as an example, they use different menus in different contries base on local people’s eating habits, and flavour preferences. This marketing strategy works well. Me and many of my Chinese friends tried Mcdonal’s in both Canada and China, and nealy 80% of us prefered the food in China’s Mcdonal’s. In the word, if the Mcdonal’s apply the same menu in China, it would not be as successful as today with more than 2000 stores in China since it entered 20 years ago.

Here is the link of Melinda Gates’ speech http://www.ted.com/talks/melinda_french_gates_what_nonprofits_can_learn_from_coca_cola.html

The various choices designed for different needs and preferences of customers in a cheap cost became viable with the help of technology. Today we can easily get any products with similar or same design but different brands and colors from T-shirt to computer to satisfy our wants. Take iphone 5S as an example, it has different colors and memory space available for customer to choose with same function. However it is a burden for a growing startup to have a few opinions. Zazzle, a company established in 2005 and growing rapidly, has find the way to solve the problem and make profits. It corporate with caseable, a Brookly-based customer product company, producing products which are made-to-order. The business model works well until now. Zazzel save the expense and risk in inventory. Only through Zazzle caseable increased its sales of ipad cases by 200% in 2012. The success of business is not incidental, Zazzel and caseable did a lot of analysis to make sure their products are able to meet demands. They considered about customer buying patterns, historical experience and seasonality to decide their selling strategy.

From this case, I learned that market research and analysis, customization and good partnership play significant role in business decisions and success.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/lydiadishman/2013/10/18/how-two-companies-partnered-to-turn-design-on-demand-into-high-growth-retail/

Article from Forbes Sep 17, 2013 talked about the common use of Tablets for customs and its effect for further product design. Forbes motioned that the market of tablets increasing dramatically even faster than that of PC market. Customers prefer to use tablets playing games, watching movies and visiting social sites, different from using PC for business and working purpose. The article also said according to research from Gartner, people pay more attention in quantity and price rather than in brand names.

Companies like Apple, Samsung and Microsoft started notice the preference of customer and try to adjust their tablets position and apart from their competitors’ products.

As we learned from economic class, customer tastes always make influence on the demand of the product. Companies who can satisfy customers’ needs more precisely will have larger market share. The other important thing to survive from intensive competition is to distinguish its products from others’ to narrow the substitutes.

In the artical, the author also mentioned the product position of Microsoft’s new Surfce as an example of  the company’s stratge of changed customer needs. Microsoft highlight Surface as a productivity tool to apart itself from rivals who focus on entertainment device.

Well, in my apinion although Microsoft can different itself from others, its product proposition won’t satisify customers tastes.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2013/09/17/research-shows-tablets-are-primarily-used-for-entertainment/