Tags: GAP 2016
Driven by increasing air pollution in China, as well an increasingly demanding industrial and retail sector, an e-commerce air-filter opportunity window has opened for the Columbus based air filter manufacturer Columbus Industries. My GAP team is visiting China to conduct a feasibility study for this new opportunity. The logistics and legal aspects are important and complicated pieces in the assessment of a go-to-market strategy for an imported product such as air-filters in China.
This week was amazing! We traveled from Shanghai to Nanjing and then to Beijing. The bullet train in China is FAST; it travels at a speed of 300 km (186 miles) per hour. The train is clean and tidy, and the seats are comfortable. Additionally, the weather has been good on these travels days, and we were able to enjoy the beautiful view of rural areas of China during the trip.
It’s fortunate (and perhaps a bit selfish) that I elected to write the cultural blog post this week. I'll report on our African safari experience – certainly the highlight of my trip so far, and I think my group members would agree.
It was when we went shopping through the streets of Bangalore that we happened to notice that a lot of retail shops belong to the same parent company. Working with Aditya Birla Group for the first time in my life, I was eager and excited to see the name “Aditya Birla Group” wherever I went. But when one of my team mates pointed it out that, unlike in the US markets, these conglomerates penetrate into every possible industry and still succeed that I started thinking about it.
Week 2 in China had a lot of interesting events for the Marketing team. One of those was a project related conference. Through contact with the OSU Beijing Alumni Association, we were invited to an event focused on Renewable Energy and Air Pollution. We talked with a number of people for in-depth interviews and invited many of them to participate in our survey. While we may have failed to speak with people at the mall, we talked to a good number of people at the conference. This opportunity helped us diversify our sample, and also increase the reliability of our survey results.