Motorola set the price for Xoom at a point of around $800,which was exactly around the same price the Apple used for its first generation ipad. However, Motorola added few more advanced features which can enable them to outperform ipad to some extend. However, this blogger think this pricing strategy although seems to make sense as Motorola offers more at the same price as its competitor, it failed to predict its competitors move in the recent future, which will have a huge impact on Xoom. The critique indicates that Motorola would definitely drop its price due to any significant changes on iPad later on, thus they shouldn’t be just reacting to it competitor’s change. What Motorola should do is to anticipate it and adopt a more reasonable price on Xoom.
In my opinion, I think the pricing strategy that Motorola used on its new product makes sense in some certain ways. For the pricing strategy on a new product, companies or manufacturers usually adopt two ways. one is called “market-skimming pricing” and another one is called ” market-penetrating pricing”. Obviously, for a high-end electronic product, the market-skimming makes more sense which sets the price at a relatively high price in order to have enough space to cut it down in the near future. Meanwhile, high price at the beginning also generate more profit as there are still a fair amount of customers who are loyalty with Android system.
The current Xoom price is extremely low today which is around $300~$400 according to different versions. However, at least this pricing strategy sets a good base at the beginning and have being adjusting the price position catering to the market needs.
Today I read a blog from my classmate William Wajaya which describing a commercial show of Adidas and through which a brand concept was delivered https://blogs.ubc.ca/williamwijaya/2011/10/10/adidas-impossible-is-nothing/. Personally, I am not sport-type person and barely know anything about sports brand. However, the message at the end this commercial show, “impossible is nothing”, is quite well-know around the world and I have been deeply inspired by it.
The brand name, Adidas, along with its logo ” impossible is nothing”, always come to people’s mind at the same time and has become a integrity. As far as I am concerned, Adidas has built up a very strong brand concept for its customers and even to its potential customers. William commented on the lady in that commercial show, ” She doesn’t look like an athlete, but that doesn’t matter, because she has the spirit of one, and with that she becomes an athlete”, which encourages me a lot. The spirit matters the most, as long as you believe and have the dream, nothing is impossible. Adidas is more than simply a athletic products producer, it possess a distinctive personality that is “positive, brave, undefeated and confident” and through which it has owned a huge brand equity.
I have to say, Adidas customers are loyalty and they love not only the material products but also the value the Adi created for them. In this case, a lot of Adidas fans are willing to pay more for only the brand name. It reminds me of a question from our textbook, “what is the buyer really buying”? He is not only buying features, he is buying benefits, ideas and beliefs. Adidas’ personality is exactly what those customers are pursuing!
At the end, I just want to share another video of Adidas, the same spirit but more imaginative, creative and inspiring.
Just few weeks ago, a couple days before Steve Job’s death, I wrote a blog about Apple app. Store. Instead, now I have started moving my eyes on real Apple Store, this huge treasure that Steve Jobs has left behind. I want to share this blog “ Steve Jobs And The 4 Counterintuitive Business Strategies Of Apple ”here This blog has drawn me quite a few reflections about the marketing theories I have learned so far. Below are the four atypical strategies while the first three are marketing-based.
Control the uncontrollable
Forget the low end
Use partnership as a last resort
Obsess over the little things
Those sound very impressive as Apple is doing just the opposite thing against normal marketing. The first one listed above states that Apple control more aspects of their product from development, usage to sales marketing and service. Apple designs their own store and developed a locked down software platform and ecosystem. They don’t even allow media access to the company, which is why we can’t even see the commercial ads of Apple on TV show.
Apple positions their products as “high end” and keeps consistent on it. Marketers usually follow the rules that when economy environment changes, customers buying power and spending patterns change as well, thus marketing strategies should change to adjust this outside change. However, Apple never lowered its status and “produced too many or compromise products quality” even in the tough period.
It is kind of funny when we first see the third strategy—the last resort is partnership??!! Unbelievable! However, it’s true and moreover, Apple has already proved the success of this strategy. Isn’t partnership a good thing to marketing?
From my point of view, there are no certain rules for marketing operation, which is exactly the beauty of marketing—people oriented. As long as it works for customers, it is the right marketing strategy.
According to my experience, most people who go shopping in Costco are large families. However, my roommate, who does not have much interest in wholesale store shopping, loves Costco as well. When asked why, she answered, “Costco offers some unique purchases with high quality and I love them”.
Costco, the largest membership warehouse club chain and the third largest retailer in the U.S. with 81 stores in Canada(http://www.infomarketingblog.com/costco-index/), has a very clear target market and position: It targets at large families and business and focuses on selling products at low prices as well as at high volume, meanwhile, maintains a high quality. How can Costco manage this?
I believe that each Costco customer has found that Costco doesn’t offer multiple brands or varieties except when it has a house brand to sell, typically under the Kirkland Signature label which is introduced by Costco in 1995 “in order to indentify categories in which a private label product could provide brand name quality at discounted prices” (Wikipedia, “Costco”). This results in a high volume of sales from a single vendor, allowing further reductions in price, and reducing marketing costs.
Costco management feels the wholesale price of a product is too high,they will refuse to stock the product. Costco once announced in 2009 that it would stop selling Coca-Cola products due to the soft drink maker refusing to lower its wholesale prices. Costco resumed selling Coca-Cola products on December 14, 2009. Due to the same reason, Costco ended relationship with Apple in December 2010.
One customer strategy Costco has been implementing is that it is only open to members and their guests. All customers in Costco hold membership cards and pay annual fee. Besides, Costco encourage its members to purchase by “email marketing strategy as it send campaigns regularly, which means they stay in the front of their customers’ minds” ( Costco, http://blog.mailermailer.com/2008/09/costco-email-marketing/).
As one of ipod users, I have a great preference for an application called “app store” built in this portable device. One of my friends said: ” If there were no app store in the iphone or ipod series, it would be like a bedroom without bed”. It sounds funny but it’s so true to me as well. However, what would be the marketing implications behind this powerful application?
I happened to find a video on youtube, which is quite helpful for giving me a much further understanding about its marketing strategy.
Jobs unveils iPhone App Store
Having spent some time reading the chapters we covered last few lectures, I find that we can apply lots of theories on this successful launch. At the beginning, I had a short difficult time defining its targeting customer group. It is seemingly are those iphone or ipod users who consume in app store. Nevertheless, after watching this video, my understanding is that although terminal customers of “App Store” are the consumers who buy applications, the actual or the direct customers here are those application developers who want to bring their app to ipod or iphone users. Apple has built up a fabulous bridge for application developers to get access to every single ipone user. “Reach to every single iphone user” appears a lot from Job’s speech and sounds to me like a meaningful and motivating mission statement of App. store.
Apple has carefully analyzed its customers’ needs and wants, both those of developers and users, finally creat On the aspect of planning marketing, “app store” attracts a large amount of app developers with its generous revenue split, thus forming a very strong market network that has created a great performance on this entire system.
Here I have another video which shows this amazing success of app store:
Hello, everyone from Comm296 section 104, I am very looking forward to having a fantastic term with you in the coming marketing classes.
My name is Ziyan Sun. however, I prefer the name Amanda that is also the name of my favourite character from a drama that I watched back to my childhood. I am an international student from China as well as a transfer student from a local college in Vancouver. Currently, I am a third year commerce student, specializing in finance. Having been to this city for over two years, I have developed a deep feeling of love for everything here, people, food, sea, beach, and the especially the timid and nice weather!
For the reason of taking this course, honestly, I did not even know that this course is required in a commerce degree until registration. However, luckily and predicatively, I had a strong sense of feeling of challenging myself by taking marketing in UBC. As far as I am concerned, this course is full of creativity, passion, imagines, psychology, and fancy. I strongly believe it will make this term an incredible journey to me and I cannot wait to see more coming. On the other hand, put in a broader view, marketing is both a brand-new study field to me and meanwhile is a life-related business to everyone. Marketing is playing an essential role to every consumer that is an identity inevitable and deniable to each of us, which means, each of us cannot live in this world without marketing.
Why did I name my blog “Early Bird”? Early bird for me symbolizes passion, energetic and hardworking, which is exactly what I see from marketing class. Here I am giving my best wishes to every classmate and friend, be a early bird every day!
