Expensive Meal = Excellent Food?

I want to discuss an issue that I have shared in the discussion in D2L. I have posted a discussion about the world's most expensive restaurant, and it is quite amazing!

These pictures show the look of each concept of the restaurant. Just by looking at the picture, you can tell how fancy it is and how expensive it is! The restaurant has an aquarium in one of their rooms! With this kind of fancy restaurant, you can imagine how the food will be! The restaurant focuses on providing a high quality courses cooked by the best chef.
Entire meal is organized with 20 courses of dishes and each meal is somehow related to the room that customers are in. I have not thought that food can be affected by the design and a mood of the room. But, with this kind of design of the room, it will definitely affect my taste! Each room as two waitresses to serve customers. I think all factors of this restaurant are the price factors for this expensive restaurant! Its design, food, service, and more!

I want to compare the previous expensive restaurant with one of my favorite restaurant in Korea.

 This restaurant is one of my favorite restaurant that I go every year when I come back home! As you can see, it is not fancy at all! The restaurant used to be very much smaller with only four tables. You can definitely tell the difference between the world's most expensive restaurant and this restaurant. Of course, this restaurant is much cheaper, but I think they have the best food, and quality of the food. Also, it is a different form of service, but the owner of the restaurant always give an extra meet for her customers. I think this restaurant used to break-even with its margin of profit, so it did not worry about losing the profit. Even though this restaurant may not seem fancy, I would consider this restaurant better than the most expensive one! It can be just me!

All I wanted to take away from this post for you is that, for some people, expensive things may be the best food for them, but for me, this shabby restaurant can still satisfy my needs and wants! 10 dollars is what I need!

Small Marketplaces in Korea

About 15 years ago, my mom and I would go to small marketplaces to shop for grocery and other necessities, however, it is not the same in the year of 2014. E Mart, Korea version of Wal-mart, was built about 20 years ago. When E Mart was first introduced, most of the consumers still went to small marketplaces. E Mart became famous after a few years later, and consumers were driven to a new world.

The introduction of E Mart and Costco brought a significant economic effect. Consumers were driven towards a large retail markets and small marketplaces owners suffered from this effect.
Large retailers carry products from many other countries and quality of products are considered better than products in marketplaces. However, I find a larger affection and louder laugh in these marketplaces.

There has been a numerous demonstration by small marketplaces owners against large retailers. Most of the time, they were ignored and these people are still suffering from the economic shift that has occurred.

Personal Selling, a Path to the Multi-Level Marketing

According to Wikipedia, multi-level marketing is a marketing strategy in which the sales force is compensated not only for sales that they personally generate, but also for the sales of the salespeople that they recruit.

Some of you might think of few products that you have purchased through a salesperson. This would be a personal selling, not a multi-level marketing. Multi-level marketing focuses on expanding its compensation through gathering more and more people to generate more money.

This marketing strategy is considered a trap for many salespeople in Korea. Many young salespeople have gone into multi-level marketing and end up with debts that they cannot pay back. For the worst example, there are people who use this strategy in a prostitution. I have seen number of news that talked about how corrupted this strategy is. It is always sad to see many young salesperson become victims of those who are blinded by money.

The Best Customer Service

As many of you know, I live in South Korea. Whenever I come back home from the states, I fly into the Incheon International Airport. Incheon Intl. Airport has been better and better with their service every year. Take a look at the view of the airport!

I think the design is fascinating! (Taking into the consideration of me being Korean..)

Whenever my friends who travel around the world, and happen to stop by Incheon International Airport, I tell them it has the best customer service. In fact, this airport has been ranked for first for nine consecutive years in Airport Service Quality(ASQ).

One news reporter published an article of what is making the best customer service at the Incheon International Airport. His conclusion was its convergence of people and know-how. There are 35,000 employees at the airport, and large number of customers fly out from the airport. It is very hard to keep its reputation of providing the best customer service every year. The airport has the service improvement organization, and has a meeting frequently to get better ideas and share experiences from workers. 

As we learned from chapter 13 about services, there is always a gap between what we think and what we get. The knowledge gap, the standards gap, the delivery gap, and the communication gap is getting smaller and smaller as workers at the Incheon International Airport work harder and harder to satisfy the customers' needs and wants. 

Personally, I am proud to say that I have this kind of airport in my country. 

Without Language

Language and advertisement amazed me during the video, "The Persuaders". Also we learned in chapter 9 about segmentation and targeting audiences. As I thought of the relationship of language, advertisement, and segmentation and targeting audiences, this came into my mind. 

What do you think of when you see this advertisement? It is not a commercial, just a single advertisement that could be hung on the wall. This is one of the public service advertisement in South Korea. When I saw this ad, I understood the point of this poster without reading small prints. Here is one more advertisement. Because these posters are for the public service, each designer had to obviously consider their audiences as the public. I think targeting the public as the audience is harder than targeting individuals. These posters had to deliver its own message to each person regarding the age, the race, etc. 

Personally, I think this poster is the best one. Actually, this poster is one of the awarded poster for the public service advertisement competition of 2013. It described the reality of the smartphone and the lack of communication. 

Language affects many things, and every second we are affected by this language through an advertisement, a poster, and more. 

Kakaotalk

Smartphone users are significantly increasing, and more apps are being created. Kakaotalk is one of the famous application in Korea. I would say it is one of the applications that literally all Koreans have!

Kakaotalk is an application that allows users to talk freely without using messaging data. It only takes the data usage. If you use WIFI, everything is free! There is a similar app in America called, What's App. These applications are globally used and becoming more famous to many people in the world! It is a great way to talk to people without paying international cost.

Out of many competitors in this application market, Kakaotalk took a first mover advantage. First mover advantage is not introduced in the chapter 5, but I think it is a important point to talk about and somehow it is related with concept of competitors. First, first mover advantage is an advantage that a business or a firm can have if it is first to enter the market. However, the drawback exists at the same time, it is called first mover disadvantage. A business or a firm needs to bear the cost of creating a business.

Kakaotalk was a new application that was introduced to the market in Korea. It pulled many users to the new kind of application. Currently, I use this application all the time to talk to my family, friend and even American friends in the states. It allows you to send not only picture, but also video, you can also make a voting system in a group chat to decide events, etc. It is a great app! But, it has experienced data errors in the past, and many users expressed a frustration, and the company had to apologize.

This application stepped over many other competitors in a early stage. Now it reached to the point that no other competitors can win over Kakaotalk. Kakaotak took its chance and experienced the first mover advantage.

Now, that you know the concept of first mover advantage, do you think a business should take this risk and pursuit its goal? What about first mover disadvantage?

LCD Shopping

I was surprised to see an example from Korea while I was reading chapter two from the textbook. Virtual store that is established at one of the subway stations in Korea. This store was built in 2011, and I actually remember that I watched a news about this! 

Here is the picture of the store! I am planning on going to this subway station and try to shop! I will post a blog about my experience later! 

As we read from the textbook, this is one of a new kind of marketing strategy that can be seen these days. South Korea is very fast pace country. Many people became "fast-fast" every time when they do something. People drive, walk, eat, and even talk very fast. I personally do not enjoy fast environment that I have in my country, because it reduces the time that we can enjoy. However, I feel this marketing strategy is perfect to many South Koreans. People work overnights almost every night and exhausted by the time they go home. These people do not have a time for grocery shopping. HomePlus brought a great marketing strategy to target certain customers, and I think so far this is going very well! 

What do you think if you can shop on the LCD screen while you are heading back to your home? If I lived near this subway station, I would use this store more than I think I would.