I read an article about OLPC( One Laptop per Child). OLPC is a nonprofit organization that try to provide low cost's laptop pc to the poor countries' children. And they allied with Intel and Microsoft. Originally, the lap top PC used Linux OS, but there were many complains and they allied with MS to use Window XP as an OS. Even though the organization has nonprofit objectives, maybe the two big companies have some intentions. Microsoft can expand their influences to the third world's children. Through these marketing, they can occupy sustainable advantage in OS market.
I think there are many companies to expand their presence to the world. Microsoft performs this task through free service. When a company's scale is worldwide grade, the management must improve their brand power rather than profits. Of course, profit is very important factor to companies, but I think brand power is more important. With brand power, companies can have advantage in competence with other companies. Microsoft may want to include the image of public sevice in their brand. Actually, Microsoft do many charity businesses and it contributes to the image of Microsoft. You know there is a survey about brand power. In the survey, Microsoft got 2nd rank follwing Coca-cola. The value of Microsoft calculated about $58 billion. It's a great value and maybe the implicit value more bigger than the index.
The value-based marketing is very critical in our period. You know Nike's shoes produced in south-east asia. But many people pay high price to buy Nike's shoes. It's the power of brand. People feel if we wear Nike's shoes, we can jump and run as the sports stars. In Korea, there are many franchise branches. If you get a Mcdonald's branch, you have to pay about 1 million dollars and have to pay royalty that is 20% of all sales. But many people want to buy the rights and pay huge money willingly. Actually, if you open franchise like that, you will not lose your money. In other words, the brand insure your success.
In korea, there are only small size franchises. In fact, worldwide franchises don't exist in Korea. I think that if we try to make our brand globally and invest in the advertisement constantly, we also can have our own worldwide franchises. It's time to invest in the intangible values.
Author: Steve Hamm
Title: Microsoft Joins One Laptop per Child
Date: May 15, 2008, 8:57PM EST
Page: 1
entry # 10 20700067
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