S. Nakamoto's Profile

This is very informative and very well structured. I found it interesting to think about how should Constellation Brands adjust consumer perceptions and demands through marketing?

As temperature rises in California, the company is increasingly being forced to relocate the winegrowing operations. The marketing message then should tie the quality of the wine less to the place and more to the state of growing area; for example, ‘Constellation Brands only grows where temperature and land compositions make the best taste of wine’. Presenting to customers that the brand did extensive research and field tests to provide customers with the best wine possible and convince customers of brand quality. It also indirectly educates people about global warming.

What I am most impressed with Uniqlo is its innovation. Everything Uniqlo produce serves precisely on customer pain points. HeatTech Technology, for example, provides warmth to wearers during cold days without having to wear think layers of clothes. The deep understanding of customers’ need shows that Uniqlo conducts extensive market research. In addition to enhancing its efficiency, I believe digitization will greatly help Uniqlo process of innovation by enabling customers to connect with Uniqlo directly.

Through its online platform, customers can post comments about the purchased products, giving Uniqlo more insights into potential problems and development it can provide to customers. Uniqlo can also use its online channel to receive customers’ innovation ideas or their current issues related to clothing, creating more ideas for future innovation.

To create the highest impact and to reach the highest adoption, I think we should develop a block-chain tracking system at an industry level. The initiation of the platform should involve all related parties of the diamond industry. Big companies can lead in setting up an organization to collect all concerns and needs of all players in the industry to create the platform and to encourage everyone to adopt it.

With increased transparency of diamond source tracking, the value of diamond from clean source will increase the value of blood diamond will significantly decrease since the blood diamond will be harder to sell. This is the price trend that we want. Once the price is down, there will be less incentive selling and consequently less incentive for unethical mining.

In a view of a non-US citizen perspective, I don’t like Donald Trump’s American First trade policy at all. It contradicts with everything the world is trying to promote: inclusivity, collaboration, and shared resources. However, no matter how much I dislike the policy, I have to admit that it actually works. At least it somehow successfully led Samsung to build the home appliance manufacturing plant in Newberry County.

To look from US manufacturers perspective, having all suppliers in its hometown yield a lot of benefits both in term of finance and production efficiency. US manufacturers will be able to source at lower prices, bear fewer logistics costs, and impose more control on the suppliers. Within the same country, suppliers can send raw material to manufacturers at a faster rate, decreasing lead time and providing more flexibility to the US manufacturers.

Since the political uncertainty which we are talking about here affects as much as 90% of Rassini’s revenue, I think that it is better for Rassini to diversify risk by moving its operation to serve more customers outside the States.

One of the relocation options would be to move production facilities to countries in South East Asia or China to benefit from lower labor cost and expand its customer base. Rassini should start the expansion right away. Even if the ‘American First’ trade policy wasn’t implemented, Rassini will have more diversified portfolio and bear the less political risk.

Thank you, Lexie, your article is very interesting and very easy to read.

I personally think that Amazon will also win in the offline retail market mainly because of the fact that Amazon is an expert on data monetization.

As you mentioned, Amazon can generate over 25% of its revenue from cross-selling or up-selling techniques based on past customer online browsing and online purchase history. Imagine how much more information Amazon will be able to collect from its brick and mortar store. Covering both offline and online shopping will offer Amazon 360 degree information of a customer. Amazon will be able to know how much the customers make, where do they live, where do they shop, who do they shop with, and much more. Having huge amount of data will enable Amazon to provide very attractive offers to customers, generating more revenue for the company. The scale of data utilization is not achievable by small brick-and-mortar store without online Amazon’s scale of online presence.

I would never have imagined the application of AR to DHL. This is so creative. I totally side with you on the fact that there will be challenges towards wide-scale adoption. I think the biggest solution here is actually time. Time will help with digital advancement. Time will help with the cost. Time will also help with public acceptance. Since AR or IoT will probably not be DHL main business, I think it wouldn’t be worthwhile for DHL to make any investment now. To wait for time and to learn more about the application, best thing DHL can do is to continue testing small-scale pilot projects of the technology.

Besides improving workers productivity and accuracy, another benefit I think DHL can utilize AR is to improve the employee work enjoyment. This might sound a little bit too unconventional but I think there is an opportunity to implement gamification through AR here. To elaborate, DHL can provide options for employees to opt in game mode and compete in teams to achieve maximum speed or a maximum number of product picked. Points can be calculated with number of product and seconds of time. To maintain the rate of accuracy, points will be greatly reduced if the action is incorrect. I think this a very creative way to make a boring job very attractive. It should help DHL with employee retention and attract the higher number of candidates for the job.

I think every company has the responsibility to help solve persisting world problems such as resource scarcity; however, it is even more important for big international companies like PepsiCo to do so since its actions will create more impact providing its huge marketing and financial power and extensive international reach. PepsiCo can try to solve the water scarcity problem in 2 steps: internally and externally.

When thinking about how to solve a problem, it’s very useful to think about the cause of it. For water scarcity, the biggest cause is water consumption. PepsiCo had already set targets to improve the water use efficiency. Another cause which is also directly related to PepsiCo is water pollution. PepsiCo has to internally control the amount of pollution its factories produce to the surrounding environment and aims to drive down the pollution rate to 0%, not just in the United States, but also in all of the international markets it operates in.

For external step, PepsiCo can utilize its marketing knowledge and capacity in each of the countries it operates in to educate people about water scarcity. The campaign will not only help solve the problem but also increase PepsiCo brand image as a brand who cares about the world problem.

For me, it’s not the question of “Why should PepsiCo do it?” but “Why not?”.

When I was in high school, one of my part-time was working in a school cafeteria managing the buffet line. I had to trash a huge amount of food every day. Rather than being dumped, the food should be donated to people who actually need. I wish the school had a better way of dealing with these food waste. It is very delighting to learn that Tesco is working on the problem.

I was shocked to know that ‘If global food waste were a country, its carbon footprint would be the third largest’. It was a good start for the United Nations to set a Sustainable Development target to reduce food waste but without more incentives or enforcement, I do not think that it will generate enough impacts. One way for the UN to overcome this issue is to work with a legal unit of each country to implement some laws which help prevent food waste; for example, UN can make sure that expiration date has to be clearly presented on all food packaging whether there is a ‘best buy’ date or not.

There is a startup in California which is working on a product to prevent food spoilage which I think Tesco should partner with. Apeel invented an edible extract which producers and retailers can put on fruits or vegetables to dramatically slow the rate of spoilage. The extract extends the fresh products’ shelf life by preventing the moisture to leave them and protecting them from oxygen exposure. I think you will find this company interesting. Here is the link in case you want to learn more about this potential solution: http://apeelsciences.com/edipeel.html.