Week 3 EOC: Making Money for Good

­The best giving charity that I found was Better World Books. This is a company that knows a thing or two about what it means to give back. It turns out that for every book that is purchased from their website, they donate to either Books for Africa, which is their longtime literacy partner or Feed the Children who have continuously found good homes for books. Better World Books started their charity back in August, 2011. They had donated over 18M books, have raised over $22M for literacy and libraries and have recycled/reused over 210M books. Better World Books also work with the two other non-profit literacy organizations; National Center for Families Learning and Room to Read. Better World Books also provides literacy grants where non-profit groups or libraries write up what they do with their grant “down to the dollar” and once they do they decide to fund the projects that they think will be the most successful pursuing or the most in need. Even though they spend so much time donating books to places like Africa and many more, they still find time to recycle things like metal shelves from libraries across the United States to help reduce carbon and support the move to a low carbon economy, with every order at BetterWorldBooks.com has the option to be shipped carbon balanced for just a few cents extra. So far, we have reached 44,000 tons of carbon offsets. Better World Books is one of many companies that are doing the best thing the world underprivileged children by giving them the opportunity to read. They’ve been around for a few years showing major progress and success in the world of charity and from the looks of it, it doesn’t seem like they’re slowing down anytime soon. With the support of books that are being bought through their business, they will continue to power through.

Week 2 EOC: Boston Consulting Group - Video Games

Boston Consulting Group is a portfolio that is used on the four square chart that helps companies and people interested in knowing where there big gaming corporate stands. “Using the now-classic Boston Consulting Group (BCG) approach, a company classifies all its SBUs according to the growthshare matrix as shown in Figure 2.2. On the vertical axis, market growth rate provides a measure of market attractiveness. “ (Page 43 Armstrong & Kolter (2011) Marketing: An introduction 10^th Ed. Prentice Hall Publishing). The four parts of the matrix is broken down into Star, Question Mark, Cash Cow and Dog. Star and Question Mark is the high points of the chart which means the game consoles is doing good in the market. For example, Apps and Computer games is the best example of stars in the BCG Growth-share matrix. Next there is Cash Cow and Dog. These are the low points of the chart which means that the game consoles are not really where they are suppose to be if they want to make it in the gaming market because they are out of date and something new is taking there place. For example, PS4 is a cash cow which is a low-growth, high-share businesses or products. These established and successful SBUs need less investment to hold their market share. http://www.giantbomb.com/articles/sources-the-upgraded-playstation-4-is-codenamed-ne/1100-5437/ Wii U is a dog because they never even had a chance to even try to stand there ground in the gaming market. The whole idea of playing a game with a stand on board and a hand controller that you could watch as you play was a stupendous idea. No one really wanted to have it in their homes or stores. “As time passes, SBUs change their positions in the growth-share matrix. Many SBUs start out as question marks and move into the star category if they succeed. They later become cash cows as market growth falls, then finally die off or turn into dogs toward the end of their life cycle. ”(Page 44, Armstrong & Kotler (2011). Marketing: An Introduction, 10th Ed. Prentice Hall Publishing).

Week 1 EOC: Great Customer Service

 The best customer service I received was when my deaf friend and I went out to the movies. We walked over to the ticket counter and told the lady who was supposed to assist us while we picked out movie. Before we purchased to tickets we told her that we could not hear and asked if the movie had a caption transmitter so we could read along with the movie. She laughed at us and asked if we were serious and when we told her that we were indeed serious she got upset and started yelling at us saying we were stupid to come to the movie ask for something like a transmitter. She yelled and asked why we even came to the movies knowing that we could not hear anything. We told her that we have always been able to go to the movies and know what was going on with the help of the caption transmitter. She laughed at us again and told us to leave the movie theater and never come back again. She even walked over to another employee and told her of what we had asked of her. Looking around the lobby, we noticed that we had caught a lot of the movie goer’s attention. Not wanting to stand there and take anymore crap from her, we decided to leave but was stopped when a guy came through the door causing the employee who was making fun of us to stop speaking. We looked back at the guy and noticed that he was the manager who apologized for the way the lady was acting, offered to give us a free movie pass, gave us the caption transmitter and even fired the lady who was being so rude to us. Before we left to head to our movie he said We "Deliver WOW through our service!"(Page 4) not create problems with our customers. Through everything we been through, I could still say that that was the best customer service I had ever had all because of the manager.