Business:
Brandt had to direct us to Skapa. I was actually excited about Skapa. Skapa is a marketing firm here in Goteborg. Skapa actually translates to Creating. The CEO is Erik Ekholm. He started the business in 1996. From that time to today he has had multiple different logos. The first chosen logo
only lasted about two years before being changed. It seemed that their main point was to drive sales with social media. Erik saw a new area for marketing through social media. Some companies to no agree with this and try to come up with as many excuses as they can. One for sure that they use is that no one in their industry does that. Which is exactly the point. Businesses need to be competitive and get a leg up on ideas before others. There is such a wide audience and social media reaches almost every single person. It is funny to learn that Erik went to school to be a Naval Architect.Erik also talked a lot about "smart online communication". He likes to focus mainly on communication and marketing. In my opinion, these two always go together. It was not until 2006 to 2008 that Erik adapted from the traditional forms of marketing to the modern forms. Unfortunately, there are some companies that are still holding on to those traditional forms of marketing. One customer that Erik has, Aber Nein, actually said, "We are not that kind of company." when Erik mentioned Facebook to him. I suppose in some industries this might work, but with how much things are changing it is hard to stay there. Skapa deals more with B2B than with B2C. When taking into account this point it does make since of why some businesses do not want to start social media. I can agree that the social media aspect would be more for the
The ideal customer for Skapa is a B2B company that is Swedish owned and deals internationally. Most of the companies that he deals with now are industrial. Which explains the B2B side of things. I would always think it would be so hard to work with a B2B company. Only because of how they are so stuck in their ways and how businesses do not seem to actually market. I think they market by just simply being a supplier. There really is not a market process, but just making sure that the deliveries are delivered on time and that the order is correct. It is more of the business strategy.
There was a very interesting video that was played for us. It was created by Erik Qualman. In this video he talked a lot about all these different statistics that relate back to the idea of social media marketing. It starts off with talking about that there is no choice in social media, it is all about well you do social media. He even mentions about how every two seconds there is another person that creates a LinkedIn account. LinkedIn is now allowing people as young as thirteen create a page. I am sorry, but at thirteen I was not thinking about careers. Erik Qualman also talks about the four P's of marketing and how there are not four P's of marketing anymore, but four C's of marketing. The
Going back to the presentation, Erik showed us the conversation prism. It looked very complicated to me. There were so many pieces branching out that I could not keep up. We did talk about the important four of social media, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube. There are apparently 1.2 million active users on Facebook. I truly believe that this number is very low. Facebook is all over the world how could there only be 1.2 million users? Considering Twitter though, 90% of the users are in the US. For some reason other countries do not use it and do not see the point in it. I do not have a Twitter account; could never figure out how it worked so I stuck with Facebook. I do have a LinkedIn account though and I am happy that I have that.
People on average reach for their phones 150 times a day. That equates to every six minutes while you are awake. That is beyond crazy! We are so dependent on technology that we do not even notice it. After this presentation is almost made me not want to use my phone, but the entire purpose of the presentation is to show why social media is so important and how it is easy marketing because of the fact that we are always on technology.
After learning about why there should be more social media marketing we learned about some interesting, but weird, new product technologies. The first one was the Alert Shirt. This shirt is worn by fans of sports. The players and the fans have this bluetooth connection where the fans feels everything that the player feels. If the player is nervous before a kick the fan is feeling that. If a player gets tackled the fan is feeling that. Pretty much anything that the player is doing is felt by the fan. I do not know how much I would like that. I mean if the player gets tackled and ends up breaking a bone or something does the fan feel that? I would not want to go through that if that is true.
The next one was the Ring, Short Cut Everything. This is simply a ring that goes on your pointer finger. It syncs up to absolutely everything sort of technology. With simply pointing your finger with the ring on and draw a light bulb the rings syncs to the light switch and allows you to turn on and off the light and even dim the lights of there is that type of switch. Also the ring can sync to your phone so that while you are driving, or too busy, by just drawing with your finger in the air you are able to type anything or call anyone. In my opinion, I would have one strong finger if I ever had that ring. I would rather just type out what I need to do or get up and turn the lights on or off. I can almost see this adding to the obesity numbers in the US.
Erik then went on to talk to us about some Apps that are out. The BroApp was one that I have never heard of before. To be honest, I never heard of any of the Apps before that he talked about. BroApp would allow guys to do what ever they wanted and when their girl friend would text him the App
Then we talked about this Chinese Taxi App. Not sure what it is actually called since the entire App was in Chinese. The gist of the App was that people could bet on taxi rides. The highest bidder of course got the taxi. I guess I would spend too much time on the betting when I most likely have a taxi right in front of me. All depends on where in the world you are. Fun fact is that Google does not work in China. They have their own search engine to use.
Navigating to Goteborg University was definitely not difficult. We had to walk back to the Central Station and get on the Number Two tram heading toward Hogsbotrop and get off at Handelshogskolan. I do not even want to try and figure out how to pronounce these words. We started calling Hogsbotrop Hogwarts. Goteborg University of Business and Economics is really interesting. The entire school takes up one small city block and is little one giant square. We can walk around the entire building and end up back where we started. The first thing that we did was have lunch. J.J. was trying to prepare us that it was only cafeteria food. Cafeteria food that was serving salmon! I had some salmon with some potatoes and a piece of bread. For dessert of course I had the cinnamon bun. To no surprise we all started talking about how we were going to go back to Carthage and tell the cafeteria people that we wanted salmon. Something that is never going to happen.
On a map Claes should us this line. The line was fairly close to the bottom of the map of Sweden.l I would say it was about a quarter of Sweden up. From what we were told, nine out of ten Swedes live below this line. It completely makes since that there would be more people living below the line since the two major cities are located below it. Nine out of ten just seems so steep. It does make since when taking into account how there truly is not much going on beyond that line. Almost as if it is the middle of no where when we compare it to cities within our country that are not surrounded by anything.
One dollar has converted to as low as 5.18 krona. Since this point in 1967, things have definitely
changed. There has been a lot of fluctuation since then. At one point around the very early 2000's a single dollar was converted to nearly 10.5 krona.Goteborg will actually be celebrating 400 years only a few years away. Claes said that there is going to be a very special celebration for that. Stockholm will be celebrating 800 years as well. In the 19th century, Sweden was considered one of the poorest due to its late industrialization. Sweden did bounce back when becoming one of the richest in the 21st century. Clearly a ton of economic growth during the 20th century.
When it comes to economics I really do not know what is going on. In these terms above I can get an idea of what is going on during these times, but some of the other slides in his presentation I have no clue what it was and I could not even try to talk about it now. I can talk about how there were a list of companies that are of Swedish origin. Out of this list only two are still Swedish, H&M and Ericsson. Companies like ABB and SKF are no longer Swedish, but remember it originally was Swedish.
The amount of information that Claes gave us is crazy. I really wish I could put it all in here, but I feel like I would bore people. I will add in just a few more interesting facts from Claes and then talk about the other professor. In 2000, a bridge was finally built from Sweden to Denmark. There has never been a bridge to connect these two countries ever before. There is no tuition fee for EU students going for their Bachelors degree. Volvo Truck is compared to Mack in the US.
Before we finished the presentation two students came in to talk to us, Eva and Anton. These two are actually going to be apart of Ask a Swede, Ask an American tomorrow and just wanted to come in and meet us first. They both are very nice and speak really good English. Eva actually lived in the
At the end we all asked some questions to get a clearer idea of things. Sweden, being the largest of the Scandanavian countries, as 0% inflation. They actually have deflation. The Scandanavian countries consist of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland. They all have friendly competition. As J.J. says he will hear jokes in Sweden about Denmark and then go to Denmark to hear the exact same joke, but about Sweden. It reminds me of the competition between WI and IL. It is all in fun and war.
Martin Oberg was our next professor. He is in the marketing department and has some pretty interesting connections. The first thing he did was play us a video. This video was very strange. The
song was completely in Swedish and the video was dark. Dark in the way that it confused you, made you sad, made you feel cold and alone, but mainly confused. This entire video showed people and their struggles, but the entire video was about the new Volvo SUV. Fun fact is that we got to view this video before the rest of the world. We all seemed to agree that the four minute commercial did not seem to really market the vehicle. This just shows how the Swedish and American cultures differ. At the end of the video it showed the Volvo SUV and said Made By Sweden. None of us pointed this out until the professor mentioned it. It said By not In. Most things say In what ever country, but this was different. I think that added so much to the importance of Volvo to the Swedes. The song that was playing, in some sort of way, translated to "as we are as people."Something that I really enjoyed about Martin is that he said, "I like other people's failures." It makes me laugh because it makes me think about when someone falls we all laugh and then ask if they are alright. I kind of looked at his enjoying people's failures as the same thing. As he defended his idea, he talked about how there are so many studies against the things that people fail at. With those studies there should not be failures. He connected this to a concept of de-malling. De-malling translates to empty mall. Looking at this as malls that have no one in them or are completely shut down. Martin then goes on to talk about the refurnish lifecycle of department stores change and need to change. I am not sure if I heard this right, but 1% of women walk through every single store when shopping for clothing at a mall. Because of this clusters start to form. Where there is one woman's
Another fun fact is that major events are never held in the capitals of countries in Europe. In 1982, The Rolling Stones held the first outside concert in Goteborg. At this time the record was around 58 thousand fans in the audience. That record as now changed to around 69 thousand. There is this idea that places form around downtown in Europe. In the 1930's a guy drew and idea of a city. This was very cartoonish, but it did represent the point. There is the downtown area and a surrounding circle is the shopping areas. Downtown is more of an attraction of fun. Shopping is not simply about shopping anymore, but about the experience. An example would be the mall yesterday where they had pole jumpers and dancing classes. Even looking at Mall of America. It is set up the same way. The center of the mall is all the attractions and fun, surrounding this area are all the shops.
Leisure:
We really did not have a lot of leisure time today. Once we got back to the hostel I was so tired I just wanted to go to sleep. I did end up falling asleep twice while trying to get things done. Then Sam realized that he left his notebook at Goteborg University, so we went to see if we could find it which was a fail due to the door being locked and no one being around to open the door. On our way back we were a little bit hungry so we just stopped at Subway to grab a sandwich and head back to the hostel. I feel bad getting Subway, but it was there and quick. After our first day visiting businesses I was pretty okay with that.
Daily Reflections:
- I need to start forcing myself to go to bed earlier.
- I can now navigate on the trams and not get lost.
- There really is a difference between people of Goteborg and people of Stockholm.
- Social Media is scary crazy.
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