ECON281 Study Guide - International Cycling Association, Fortean Times, Horch

Find recent evidence in the Wall Street Journal and other business publications on how companies are expanding the use of the techniques described in the opening case to understand and impact consumer behavior.

The business world is ever-evolving, and that has never been more evident than in today's world. The business world has transitioned from a face-to-face meeting and sales pitch way of doing business. To now online sales and marketing being the most effective and impactful way to reach a specific audience.

Nothing has proven to be a bigger or more cost-effective tool than social media. In the last five years, there has been over a 48 percent increase in the number of Americans that have at least one social media profile. That means at least nearly 250 million Americans can be reached by a single post online. This doesn't even factor in the usage of social media all over the world. The most successful businesses that are using the online platform to market their products can create beautiful content that can be geared toward any demographical choice that the company wants. With the ability for social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, and most recently Instagram and Snapchat to know what the user has most recently searched, companies can create content that will be interesting and appeal to that specific person. This saves countless time and energy of the old days of manually taking samples and polls of people, that even selected at random, could steer a company in the wrong direction and turn to make a wrong decision. Social media is a free platform for companies to broadcast themselves, see what people are saying about their product, and even more importantly, figure out what the issues are with what they are doing so that a reputation is not destroyed

Patel, S. (2015, June 24). How Businesses Should Be Using Social Media in 2015. Retrieved from Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/sites/sujanpatel/2015/06/24/how-businesses-should-be-using-social-media-in-2015/2/#3706374e8856

I NEED A PEER REPLY FOR THIS

Lonely Planet In 1972, Tony and Maureen Wheeler were newlyweds who decided to have one last adventurous travel experience before settling down. Their trip was an overland trek from London to Australia through Asia. So many other travelers asked them about their experiences that they sat down at their kitchen table and wrote a book titled Across Asia on the Cheap. They published the book themselves and were surprised by how many copies they sold.

More than three decades and 60 million books later, their publishing enterprise has turned out to be one of the most successful in history. The Wheelers%u2019 publishing company, Lonely Planet, has grown rapidly, with typical annual sales increases of 15 percent or more. In 2007, BBC Worldwide purchased a 75 percent ownership interest in the company and purchased the rest of the company%u2019s stock in 2011.

Lonely Planet TV now produces a variety of travel and documentary programs that appear on cable networks throughout the world. As a BBC subsidiary, the company does not release sales figures, but industry analysts estimate current annual revenues to be about $110 million. Lonely Planet publishes more than 600 titles and holds a 20 percent share of the travel guide market. The company has more than 450 employees in its U.K., U.S., French, and Australian offices performing editorial, production, graphic design, and marketing tasks.

Travel guide content is written by a network of more than 200 contract authors in more than 20 countries. These authors are knowledgeable about everything from visa regulations to hotel prices to the names of the hottest new entertainment spots. The combined expertise of the in-house staff and the in- country authors has kept Lonely Planet ahead of its competitors for many years.

Lonely Planet also offers travel services that include a phone card, hotel and hostel room- booking, airplane tickets, European rail travel reservations and tickets, package tours, and travel insurance. These services are sold by telephone and on the Lonely Planet Web site. The Web site has won numerous awards, including the Society of American Travel Writers Silver Award and a spot on Time magazine%u2019s %u201CFifty Best Web Sites%u201D list.

The site was launched in 1994 and includes an online store in which Lonely Planet publications are sold. However, the site%u2019s main draws are its comprehensive collection of information about travel destinations and its online discussion area, the Thorn Tree, which has nearly a half million registered users. The company has had trouble turning any of this information into a source of revenue generation. Despite its excellent Web site and its use of new technologies, most of Lonely Planet%u2019s revenues are still generated by book sales.

The typical production cycle of a travel guide is about eight months long. This is the time it takes to commission authors, conduct research, work through several drafts of writing and editing, select photos, create the physical book, and print it. This production cycle causes new books to be almost a year out of date by the time they are published. Only the most popular titles are revised annually. Other titles are on two-, three-, or four-year revision cycles. The time delay in publication means that many details in the guides are outdated or wrong; restaurants and hotels close (or move), exchange rates and visa regulations change, and once hot night spots are abandoned by fickle clientele. Lonely Planet publications are well researched and of high quality, but the writers do not work continually because the books are not published continually.

The Web site often has information that is more current than the published travel guides. The site%u2019s online shop does offer some custom guides, which are parts of its existing travel guides packaged in different ways, and it does let customers buy specific chapters from its books, but it still is largely focused on selling books, although the site does offer PDF files that can be downloaded to mobile devices. Lonely Planet has adopted some new technologies, but has not used them to change its revenue model in any major way or to make basic changes in the production of its main product, the travel guides.

Required: 1. Review the company%u2019s offerings for Apple iPhone and iPad products and for Android smart phones (Trippy). Evaluate those products and identify opportunities for other products or services that the company could offer for mobile devices that would take advantage of Internet technologies (including wireless technologies for mobile devices) and address customers%u2019 concerns about the timeliness and currency of information in the printed travel guides.

2. Prepare a report in which you analyze the marketing channel conflicts and cannibalization issues that Lonely Planet faces as it is currently operating. Suggest solutions that might reduce the revenue losses or operational frictions that result from these issues.

1. Howard needs to buy a laptop computer to start online university courses. The price at the local computer store is $650. The identical computer is available at one online site for $605 and another site, for $622. All prices include the appropriate sales tax. The accompanying table indicates the typical shipping and handling charges for the computer ordered online.

a. Define opportunity cost in economic terms.

b. In this situation, what are the opportunity costs of Howard choosing to buy online instead of at the local computer store? Note that if you buy the computer online, you must wait to get it.

c. Show all of the relevant choices for Howard.

d. What determines which of these choices Howard will choose?

2. During the improving economic conditions of 2015 and early 2016 much additional construction of homes and condos throughout much of the U.S. took place. This provided a significant increase in the income of workers in the construction trades. Many of the construction workers were immigrants and have family and relatives in other countries. Often these workers would send part of their income to their less fortunate relatives in their old country, especially in Mexico and some of the South American countries.

a. Which of the economic principles best describes this situation?

b. Using the principle you have selected, describe the chain of events that best explains how increased spending for U.S. home and condo construction is likely to affect the performance of the economies of these South American countries.

3. From June 2008 oil was at a high of $144.78 per barrel. During the period from April 2011 until July of 2014, the price of oil hovered between about $115.32 per barrel and about $105.22 a barrel. Then, starting in August 2014 oil began a precipitous fall in price from the $105.22 to $33.62 a barrel in January 2016. Although the U.S. has great amounts of oil that can be brought out of the ground by fracking, by the beginning of 2016 many of the workers in the U.S. oil exploration and drilling industry were out of work and tremendous amounts of oil exploration equipment was sitting in the equivalent of used car lots to be sold.

a. Which of the economic principles best describes this situation?

b. Using the principle you have selected, describe the chain of links that best explains how the falling international oil prices caused U. S. workers to be laid off and available U.S. oil to be left in the ground.