Not Buying iPods Becomes A Patriotic Issue In South Korea
from the made-in-south-korea dept
Apparently, the widespread success of the Apple iPod in South Korea is ticking off some Korean consumer electronics companies, who are taking out newspaper ads trying to encourage a patriotic boycott of the iPod in favor of South Korean-made portable media devices. Of course, the simple solution to this issue is to make a better product.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Not to be taken lightly
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Re: Not to be taken lightly
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Re: Not to be taken lightly
Because they are cheaper. Americans do not tend to show much solidarity when it comes to boycotting a country's goods when those goods are cheaper than their American counterparts.
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Re: Not to be taken lightly
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Re: Not to be taken lightly
America has barely any competitors to South Korea in TV's other devices of the such. Take a look at Electronics stores. Zenith is owned by LG.
If anything, it's just a last ditch effort by the South Korean MP3 companies. I've seen a lot of them and they are good products.
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A company appealing to social mores rather than in
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Free Market?
I must i am little surprised that mp3 players have stirred up so much emotion though.
Where does apple make those things anyway? China? Taiwan? malaysia? Maybe its nice to see people caring about employing their own citizens, something americans don't care about
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Re: Free Market?
5.6% unemployment rate in America. Germany is over 13% unemployment. Before you spout your 'Hate America' dialog, get some education.
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American Competition
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what is Korea good for anyway....
the only thing I see coming out of Korea is a ton of spam mail...
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boycott?
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No Subject Given
Then there's the obvious other side... buying because of the country of origin - as opposed to product quality - lets domestic producers sit more complacently with inferior products rather than stepping up to the plate and really competing with the threatening companies.
Let's not kid ourselves here though... Korea's not the only one to have companies jump on the nationalism boat to boost flagging sales. In particular, this sounds a heckuva lot like U.S. automakers' reaction to Japanese imports. U.S. automakers eventually decided to get down to business.
In the end though I question how effective this will be. Even in this era of Republican-induced hyper-patriotism, if you started flying the flag and telling American kids to buy Xbox instead of Playstation 2, how effective do you think that would be? I doubt it'll be much more effective in Korea.
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Here's the ad!
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Re: Here's the ad!
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