You need to speak louder! WPI Venture Forum!

I went to WPI venture forum for once before I learned from prof. Shari, however, to be honest, I never knew about that the activity I attended before is venture forum until I realized that the process (having pizza, social network, and then presentation) is totally same with the one I took two weeks before. As a WPI business school student, I supposed to be familiar with this activity, which I didn’t. I don’t know whether it is because that I came from a total different country and culture environment where lake of entrepreneurship, or I did not pay much attention on school social event. Or it is simply because the poor marketing of VF even in WPI campus.

As we learned in MKT 566 class, we know that VF is composited with three part—entrepreneurs, investors and sponsors. It should be the paradise of entrepreneurs to find capital, investors to find potential rewards, and sponsors to build their fames among all the people who attend. However, as a student, and a potential entrepreneur, I did not receive any positive message that WPI VF was a place full of opportunities.   Again, I don’t deny that it might be my personal problem, but I believe there exists numbers of students who faced with the same puzzle.

Since the entrepreneur is the most important composition for VF, I think to make buzz among entrepreneurs is the first thing WPI should do. WPI campus should be the first place to launce this marketing campaign. We can see print ad of VF in campus now but is not enough. Most of VF ad content is full of words and busy students can hardly stand by and get VF information from poster board. VF faced with same problem with email ads. When I receive a VF information email, I rarely read through over it. Every student receives tens of emails every day and if the ad cannot catch their attention at the first time, that ad lost value. What’s more, based on my experience and what I learned from VF, I highly recommend that every business school professor hold a night for VF on syllabus and request student attend a VF which has related topic with that class. Also, the WPI VF website and social media webs should be well designed. There should be an online forum (linked with Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin) for students to discuss, provide ideas and give suggestions about the VF they experienced.

The other part of entrepreneurs is from WPI alumni and Boston area who want to create their own business, especially who want to step into high-tech industry. (WPI is famous with its engineering programs) So beside social media, WPI can reach alumni by email, or some alumni events. Also WPI can add venture forum information on WPI alumni home page. WPI VF also can cooperate with industry associations to encourage entrepreneurs on industry conferences to come and see WPI venture forum.

Get away from 10.09 Venture Forum

This was not the first time I went to Venture Forum, but I got a lot from this venture forum. This experience made me feel so good about venture forum, what I did not really get involve with. 

Since we are all doing business model and trying to run our own ideas, this experience came just in right time. I remembered that the first speakers said we need to keep track of the head questions. This is what we need to do when we make our hypotheses into real. Actually I used this method already on our business plan—deliver service. I asked several friends about what questions they generated after hearing our business model. And I realized that the question they asked most frequently is that how we can differentiate with existed delivery companies since they also provide online service, re-deliver, and pick up DIY services. Then we discussed about this question and then conclude that we need to give our customers most convenience---distribute at walk distance for most of target customers. Then another question came---how can we cover the high storage cost if distribute so intensive? This question helped us finally decide to cooperate with gas stations and some retail stores to build warehouses inside gas stations and retail stores.

For the second part, I think MoMe would have huge potential market if it gets a good start and operate. I remembered some people asked a question about how to do research in early market, especially some brand new products which had no similar product in market. That would be a question in front all of marketing people. And the answer we got from that was really instructive: data from whole industry, data from parallel industry, or simply talk with people. For the angel invest part, I have to admit that I got somehow lost. (I’m really not a financial person) But I Google angel invest and found that 1 out of 10 projects will fail for angel investors. I couldn’t help but wondering how many profits they can get from on success project can drive them take risk of 9/10 failures!

The man sat beside me, whose name is David, is a really kind person. He took WPI’s courses every year in last 32 years!! Holly! Do we have that many courses in WPI？I found that he is doing the same business with what my families trying to do in China. And I’m pretty sure that venture forum is really a good place to build network and lean from each other. 

Internet, Santa or killer?

Image a day without internet, what will you do? No online music, no online movie, no online chat, no online shopping, no online homework, no email, no facebook, no e-book, at all, what will you do? How long can you live without internet? For me, I guess, just one day can drive me crazy!

Believe it or not, internet is already part of our life, and whatever you like it or not, you cannot deny that internet is changing our life styles. Just as the article we read before, Google made us stupid, I blame this to internet. After all, Google, as a single cell of whole internet, cannot influence us without internet. We do be changed by internet as a single person. How about whole society? Still, we can see the change! Economic Value of the Advertising –Supported Internet Ecosystem gave us very convictive data to show what internet bring to whole society.

The data didn’t surprise me. Internet is not a simple product in our modern society. It is a tool connects all industry and customers. It generate 2 million employment opportunity in 2011 and will create more positions in the future, for sure. This number not only comes from the employment from IT and online marketing department, but also from increasing small entrepreneurs. In my memory, holding a company and being a true boss is a really hard thing. I admired all the people who owned a company when I was a child. However, ten year past, when I went into college, I found that some classmates started to run their own online stores. They became small companies’ owners. Some friends even gave up high salary jobs and insisted their own business.

Some people earn while some people lost, however. We can see a lot of industries are struggling while internet is shining. Newspaper is dying, the only thing people need is news; album is dying, the only thing people need is music; retail stores are replaced by online stores; traditional books are replaced by e-books. Large amounts of staffs in traditional industry are being worried about losing job someday somehow while large amounts of younger people find their suitable position in online industry.

History wheel never stop turning. We watched so many products or industries sparkled one time and vanished other time. Will internet be replaced by something else? Of course it will. There must be another more stable and faster system showing up. And we need to definitely be careful, catching the opportunities while avoiding being replaced.

Reference：
http://www.iab.net/media/file/iab_Report_September-24-2012_4clr_v1.pdf

QR—Connecting Offline and Online Life

Four years ago, when I was still an undergraduate student, the most excited activity I remembered was provided by Chinamobile. We could use the credit in our accounts to exchange McDonald’s meal combos. I used 1500 M credit (one RMB input to account = one M credit) and get a text saying I can show this text to any McDonald’s in Beijing and get one specified meal combo. I brought this text and give my Nokia (Symbian) to counter, and he just scanned my phone by a small black machine while passing my meal. It took me less than 2 mins from stepping into Mc to leaving, counting into waiting in line, and I didn’t even need to order. At that time, the only sentence in my mind was: Holy! How magic technology is!

Four years past, right now, I not only knew what the magic text contained, but also learned international name for that magic—Quick Response. The article I read gave us a lot of statistics showing that QR is becoming a fast growing tool for marketing. And it also provided us who and how provide and receive information form QR. The question I generated at first was that why home usage is higher than outdoors. As my understanding for QR, it’s a convenient method for customers to get more information while shopping, or being used as a ticket or coupon, just as what I did in Mc. That says, usage at outside or stores supposed to be higher. However, when I saw that almost 50% scanned QR were from newspaper or magazines, I began to understand. People are more likely get discount or product information from reading mails, newspapers, magazines, etc., or surfing on PC, all of which are more possible down at office or home.  

Since half of scanned happened at home or office where has PC. I’m wondering why they can’t just set a scanner into PC. When I needed to read some product information at home or near a PC, I preferred to read them on PC because when I found some interesting factors of that product, I can buy it by simply clicking the link driving me to online store.

QR (or something similar) must be the bridge between on line and off line in the future. Whatever people saw off line, like news on newspaper, can simply find it online by simply scanning. Every product people use off line can be found related information and use reviews online by simply scanning. Every business card can be store into your online account by simply scanning the QR on it. What QR can bring to us is far more than what does right now. The only problem is that customers can’t scan easily, or in other words, the amount of devices which can scan is too limited. Maybe in the future, every mobile should contain the QR scan program and all PCs also should have PC scanner. While QR market become mature, marketers can get customer’s location and buying behavior through QR data management, and then make specific marketing plan to each customer. At that time, however, customer privacy is another problem.

“Marketing Is Dead”? Are you killing me?

When I first saw this title, I was shocked! As a marketer, what am I doing here if marketing is dead? But after I read this article, I really believe that Bill made a joke on us, or he just tried to attract our eyes. (He really did! Look at the long page of comments!) The whole article tells us that traditional marketing is not useful anymore, and marketing is turning into a worldwide social network based on mouth-to-mouth advocating.

I do agree the reasons he generate about people are getting numb about traditional media ads, CEO always want to see real increase on sale in such a competitive world, and some marketing people market by the way they thought but not customers really need. I do think he gave us a really good idea about how to market in a new way. Letting customers market product by themselves is really a smart idea. This marketing way is low cost, low human resource use, and low time cost but still can gain high efficiency and good reputation for company. However, can we really say that marketing is dead, or step back, traditional marketing is dead? Can we really get rid of TV and radio, which have been accompanied with us when we were little kids? Can we really adapt the living environment without print ads or TV commercials at all? Can you? At least I can’t.

How about laggers?! They reject to use internet, even computer! All the information they gain from are traditional marketing methods. OK, maybe you will say that most of them are old people who cannot lead the market at all, and maybe tens years later, this kind of people won’t exist at all. So how about the developing countries? Only 2.2 billion, about a third of world populations, are using internet. (http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm) How about the other two third of populations? Give up introducing products to them and making money from them? The way Bill introduced is a good marketing method, but if we marketing only depend on it, we will face to so many problems.

If we only go with “community-oriented buying experience” and build brand reputation in a small community, there will show up too many uncertain possibilities. Brand imaged would be different in each different community. And how if there are some bad comments on our product？ We cannot even control them since the “marketers” are all customers. What’s more, the distribution will be crucial to each company since people can only know you by using you. You have to make sure that every little community sells your product. However, if a product shows up in TV, people from all around the world will know this product, and they will buy this product no matter in their city or other cities while travelling if they like this product.

Bill mentioned social capital in this article and thought that the “new marketing helps its advocates and influencer create social capital”. How do you think about that? We need to eat every day and social capital cannot satisfy our essential needs at all! I would rather to choose a 25% discount card!

I like the idea of “customer advocates involved in the solution you provide”. However, as Bill said himself, it only can be used on non-profit program. We cannot deny that everybody is economic motivated.

All in all, the way Bill gave is a smart marketing choice, but we cannot say this method can replace traditional marketing. Maybe traditional marketing will be forgotten in the future, but we only can say maybe.

We will see it, together.

Reference:

Marketing Is Dead, BILL LEE, http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/08/marketing_is_dead.html

Watch out! Customers are not stupid anymore!

About 13 years before, I found a piece of glass in “Axiangpo” hot sauce, and at that time, I did think about whether to call media and gain some compensation from Taiyang Co. However, concerned about that there would be huge numbers of calls I needed to make and I was really a little girl and maybe nobody would listen to me, I gave up. What would I do if I was in this modern society, I asked myself. The answer is: I would never get them off easily! How if I ate that glass? I did not even dare to think about the result! I would use as many as sources--Facebook, Renen, Weibo, twitter, or whatever--to stop the same thing happening on other customers. The changing behavior is fortunate to customers, and to companies, I can only say: I’m sorry, watch out before you do anything!

For P&G, let’s get rid of the possibility that competitors’ adding fuel to the fire, although there is a high possibility, the crisis they faced is pretty common in our society. We should never doubt the power of gossip, not to mention something really happened. The company I worked for had faced with the same problem, and the only difference is that my company is pure innocence. One of the products in US General Mills had some “quality problem” since a kind of heavy metal excess Chines eligible heavy metal level. (China and USA has different heavy metal standard level, and that product was only sold in USA, which is eligible) And that news translated by Chinese media was: Haggen-Daze, which is the main product of China General Mills had problem of high level heavy metal. Ridiculous! I laughed out when I first heard about this news, I thought nobody would believe that since they cannot prove anything. However, when I saw my director’s face, I realized that things would not as simple as I thought. Customers would like to believe whatever news harmful to them. And the result is my boss had to call media she knew one by one and explained the truth to them, she almost had no food and sleep during that two days. (I have to say that every time this kind of things happened I always felicitated myself secretly that I was only a small intern.)

Things became more seriously when it came to babies. I feel painful and angry when I read what Moms write about the pain their babies going through. Babies are so innocence. And I can’t image what patents feel when they hear babies crying. When we think about this incident as a real person, everything happened on social media made sense. I think that also is counted into P&G’s response strategy, they tried to stand at the Moms’ side and thought like them. This should be the only thing they could do to calm customers down. I can’t say what P&G did was right, but it was what most companies did when they faced with crisis, and it worked. P&G didn’t response to this crisis directly and they decided to transport customers’ concentration. The Facebook page was still there but there were more news about how P&G care about babies would occupy layout of news webs. Time will wash away everything, and what companies need to do is decrease crisis concentration from customers. After all, we can see Pampers is still top selling among diapers products.

Reference:

 Paul Gillin, Attack of the Customers: The Pampers Dry Max Crisis

http://gillin.com/blog/2012/08/attack-of-the-customers-the-pampers-dry-max-crisis/

Matt Harrison, P&G responds to Pampers Dry Max concerns

http://wave.wavemetrix.com/content/pg-responds-pampers-dry-max-concerns-00091

Watch out! Internet is coming!

Since this article- Is google making us stupid- was published in 2008, the problem author worried about is becoming true. Actually, as a student who never used traditional book to search information, I feel like using internet to search what I want has been, and always been the rule. We don't have that much time to fight with so much things. Google gave us a big favor to find what we exactly need in short time instead of a system,  time- wasted knowledge storage.

But as a youth who spend so much time on Internet. I can still fell the change. Our communicat tool changed from renren(Chinese Facebook ) to  Weibo( Chinese twitter), which contains more information and much shorter articles. Just as the google article mentioned, people can't concentrate on one article for a lone tiem. Look at how renren try to alive! The hot articles and images all have a long title- which could describe almost all interesting information in the article or images folder, which could scrab people's eyes at the first glance, and which could tell people how interested this article or image is without arduously click or even read it.

We are receiving ten times or hundrads times more information than before, and we are indeed changing our think mood to adapt fast changing information. What google gave us are pieces of knowledge point, rather than the whole, complete knowledge system. Whether google will accelerate the speed we accept information, or it will finally distry our knowledge system? Or whether this high speed and point-based information acception will trian our brain to classify and connect all useful informaiton, and turn them into a larger scale knowledge system? We don't know the anwser. We cannot even say this change is good or not.

The only thing we can do and we must do is adapt this change. Think about what TV bring to us and changed our lives? People spend less time speaking with neighbors and hanging out with friends. Families choose to watch TV during dinner rather than talk about what happend today. These kinds of changes are what people never think about before 1950s. But how about now? We totally familiar with them! Internet brings us a new life style, and it will continue to be e trend. We need to adapt it and get benefit from it as soon as possible. Change makes people afraid, but change is not awful. Falling far behind the change would be the only thing make you lose many opportunities.