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...Tingyi hired specialized staff to ensure that its products were being sold not just in large supermarkets and convenience stores but in the tiny xiaomaibu, or corner grocers, where Chinese consumers still make a large share of incidental purchases. "Control over end distribution channels is one of Tingyi's key competitive advantages," according to the China Brands Index from Hong Kong brokerage CLSA...
...Those same sales staff also offer a key channel for market research, assessing how Master Kong is received in the homeliest neighborhoods. And that all helps further growth. Wei acknowledges that Master Kong has to stay humble. "If you tell people Kang Shifu is a company that makes good coffee, they will never believe it," he says (coffee being too foreign and expensive-sounding). "So our brand extension is limited by our customers." But those customers have been great for Tingyi, especially amid the uncertain economy of 2009, when it was a distinct advantage to be dealing in low-cost...
...according to CLSA, versus 10% for challenger eLong, which is majority-owned by Expedia and has followed a more fitful progression - initially offering vacation packages, but temporarily withdrawing them in 2007 to focus on air tickets and hotels. Both players offer nearly identical prices, so customer service is a key point of difference. While Chinese Web users have become more sophisticated about researching prices on the Internet, they still prefer to buy tickets by phone (just 35% of Ctrip's customers buy their air tickets via the website). Ctrip's step-by-step approach has also helped there, enabling...
...House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to apologize. "Quite frankly, I fear the pace at which we have grown may have been too quick," he said, as members of the Japanese press and employees sporting Toyota buttons thronged the hallways outside. Yet the spectacle failed to answer a key question: whether Toyota has pinpointed the problems that caused it to recall more than 8 million cars, including over 6 million in the U.S., since last fall...
...Threat from Within," Jim Frederick misses a key reason the Fort Hood massacre happened [Feb. 22]. The National Command Authority has made a misguided but conscious decision not to educate the country too well about the strategic goals of al-Qaeda et al. Had it done so early on, politically attuned junior officers and noncoms would have stepped forward from the get-go to identify Islamist sympathizers like alleged shooter Major Nidal Malik Hasan. That's the way it works. With a more honest and robust definition of the enemy, proaction would have been expected. Sadly, the country...