Article Review Marketing

Article Review Marketing

The global business environment is transforming each passing day due to the advances in technology and improved business practices. As a result, marketers have found it difficult to always to keep an eye on the slightest opportunities that emerge in both local and international markets. Two articles that seem to these news aspects of business marketing are; “Why Falling Food Prices Around the World Arent Helping U.S. Consumers” by Jordan Yadoo and “Why Apps Convince Shoppers to revisit the Mall?” by Phil Wahba. In his article, Jordan Yadoo provides an explanation as to why the American consumers did not realize the decline in the global food prices witnessed in 2015. This article on the Bloomberg Business explains in details why consumer commodities especially foodstuffs are highly processed implying that the cost of production prohibits the price cuts. On the other hand, Phil Wahba’s article revisits the topic of e-commerce and how brick-and-mortar businesses are leveraging on mobile technology to mitigate the effects of online shopping.

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“Why Falling Food Prices Around the World Aren’t Helping U.S. Consumers” paints a picture of how consumers in America do not enjoy the low prices of food products in the global market. It is an interesting read for me because I have been wondering why consumer food prices remain constant in the local market despite global fall in prices of farm fresh products. As highlighted in the article, before the raw commodities are passed to the consumers, they go through a series of processes from processing, transportation, distribution to storage. All these stages involve significant costs that cannot be offset by the price decrease of the raw products.

In relation to the class reading, the demand for the raw commodities in America is relatively inelastic, that is, a change in the price in the farm products (agricultural and dairy products) does not affect the demand in the consumer markets (slide 24). For instance, a decrease in the price of coffee berries does not translate to a reduction in the price of coffee in restaurants. Coffee undergoes various stages of production for it to come out as a finished product ready for consumption. In addition, raw agricultural products price falls are quite seasonal. Hence, it is not economically feasible to lower prices of finished products when there is a surplus in the market.

It is indisputably evident that with the advent of information technology, the business environment has completely transformed. Today, for a business to remain competitive in the global market space, it has to embrace new ways of marketing, customer service, selling, and distribution. Online shopping, for instance, has taken the retail industry by storm and businesses no longer have to rely on the walk-in customer to increase sales.

The Wahba’s article “Why Apps Convince Shoppers to revisit the Mall?” is interesting to me because it gives an example of how a traditional brick-and-mortar is trying to address the falling foot traffic in its stores. By filling the pinch of the online shopping, Westfield has created a mobile app that can alert the customers on the available parking lots.

Thus, the customers are no longer inconvenienced whenever they visit the shopping centers.  This is a classic example of how a business should not be troubled with the concept of e-commerce, but rather use the same technology to counter it (slide 8).

Although brick-and-mortar sales in the United States are falling drastically each year, repositioning is critical for such businesses to avoid being edged out of the market as time goes.

Works Cited

Wahba, Phil. “Why Apps Convince Shoppers to Revisit the Mall?” Fortune (2015). Retrieved      from: http://fortune.com/2015/12/13/westfield-mall-parking-app/?iid=leftrail

Yadoo, Stone. “Why Falling Food prices Around the World Aren’t Helping U.S. Consumers.”     Bloomberg Business (2015). Retrieved from: