Post 10: So long, and thanks for all the fish!

Hello, guys!

How is everything going? I hope you are fine and ready for my last post. Yes, my last post, I know it is sad, but everything that is good in life one day will come to an end. Now, let’s start to talk about what is the point of this last post. This post is about what I learned and how was my overall experience with this blog project and with my course in general.

The first thing I want to talk about is the concepts to make business decisions and the evaluation of its outcomes, because the way this course taught that was really interesting. We used a tool from a website called mhpractice.com, where we made groups to sell backpacks, with this software we spent money on advertisement, changed features of the backpacks, among other things. Then, we analyzed the results and changed some things in order to get a better net profit at the end of the next week. This was a really fun and interest way to learn all the things involved in marketing a product, form controlling the budget to invest in promotion, to the price and places we would sell our product.

This game that we played also help us to develop the ability to participate and communicate as an effective member of a group, because every week we need to sit down together with our team members to discuss what would be our changes in the strategy and in our product to try to have a more successful company, alongside to that we also had a great amount of group activities in class, to come up with solutions to different problems, or with ideas to new products, or even just with different examples for some situations.

Another concept that the game helped develop was to use experimental learning to improve our knowledge and skills, because as I said before we did a great amount of things inside this game, from hearing feedback from our target market and decide the features of our product, until choosing the channel of advertisement that we would use.

The income statement we needed to do to evaluate our company in the simulation is a great example of building a decision model in Excel to evaluate decisions and outcome of our simulation, another great skill that we develop during this semester. The income statement also helped us to learn better how to analyze and evaluate basic financial statements and business formulas, such as Return on Equity, profits, among others.

I cannot forget to mention the fact that we had to present a TED Talk and criticize two commercials in front of the class during this semester, we also had to peer review blog post from our colleagues of the marketing course and we had to right a blog, after all it is where you are reading this post right now, these three things are a great example of using written and oral skills to persuade a target audience.

So, that is it. I hope you guys enjoyed this journey. I really appreciated it everybody that read my post and showed me some support. Thanks for everything guys!

So long guys, and thanks for all the fish!

Leo.

Blog 9: Athletes in Commercials

Hello, people of the world!

How are you doing? I am doing fine, hope you guys too. Well, a little bit of context before I start talking about my post today. I love sports, especially basketball, and there I was playing basketball yesterday, unfortunately I sprained my ankle pretty badly, now I am here lying in my bed, since I am not able to walk, writing this post for you. However, what this bad situation has to do with my post? Well, this accident made me think about athletes, and then I thought about talking about some great commercials involving athletes, and why companies like to use them in their commercials.

Let’s start talking about why a company would pay a great amount of money to have athletes and celebrities in general in their commercials, what are the advantages? Well, there are a lot of reasons, but first the companies have to choose carefully the celebrity that they will use, because for the public if the celebrity is likely to really use the product, then they will give more credibility for the commercial. One advantage for use athletes and celebrities in commercial is the power to influence consumer purchase, because people can think that if this product is good enough for him, it will be good enough for me. Another advantages are to build brand awareness, attract new users and position a brand, which is to position certain product the best way possible in the minds of a target group.

After this great explanation, let’s talk about some great and memorable examples. Starting with this commercial that is relatively new by Foot Locker.

This commercial has an all-star cast of athletes, such as Mike Tyson, Evander Holyfield, Kyrie Irving, Craig Sager, Brett Favre and Dennis Rodman. I am not going to explain why every situation is so funny, but this commercial used athletes in a comic way to address how the world seems perfect because of a Foot Locker’s promotion, and for illustrate the “all is right”. I bet it was not easy to convince all this athletes to make fun of them, but it’s wonderful that they made this commercial possible, because it is one of the best athletes commercial in recent years. They were clearly trying to use fun to catch the attention of their target market, making people interest in their promotion.

Another great example is the promotion made by Pepsi Max.

This is a commercial starring Kyrie “Uncle Drew” Irving, one of the best point guards in the NBA nowadays, this is a great commercial because the campaign of the Pepsi Max was named “a zero-calorie cola in disguise”, so they put a great NBA player in disguise to play some basketball with random people in a park, to try to convince people that this is a great soda even that it is zero-calorie. This campaign also try to get the knowledge of people with humor, disguising an NBA player as an elderly person and putting him to play with regular people.

Now, to end this post I will talk about my favorite and, in my opinion, the best athlete of all time in any sport: Michael Jeffrey Jordan. If you grew up in the 1990’s like me, he was probably your hero and you probably wanted to be like Mike. I can talk about it his Nike commercials that are pure inspiration to players and for everybody’s life, like these:

However, I will just talk about the commercials that he made with Gatorade. Gatorade was really far behind the competition in 1991, bet then they decided to go big and hired Michael Jordan to be the new face of the brand, paying him $1.4 million dollars a year, maybe it’s not that much now, but it was a huge deal back in the day. Then they started a campaign called “Be Like Mike”. I can bet that is probably impossible that you do not know this ad, but here it is, anyway.

This commercial skyrocketed Gatorade, it was a huge success and put Gatorade on top of the market. It was such a huge success that now, 20 years later, people still remember and reference this ad. This helped Michael to become a worldwide celebrity, which is how popular this ad was. Using a well-known song from Disney’s “Jungle Book”, and an athlete with infinite charisma and talent, this is for me one of the greatest ads starring an athlete of all time.

Well, that’s all folks. I hope you liked as much as I did and thanks for reading it.

Take care,

Leo.

References:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KMUnqB_NiU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DnKOc6FISU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zSVu76AX3I

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhsfwYD7vdY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPFOlXo7UPI

http://smallbusiness.chron.com/five-advantages-using-celebrities-advertising-34394.html

http://www.therichest.com/sports/other-sports/top-10-commercials-starring-athletes/6/

Blog 8: Co-Branding

Hello, everybody!

How is everything going with you guys? I hope everything is all right. I am very busy lately, and in one of my presentations in my marketing class I decided to show an ad made by Budweiser along with UFC, this ad showed a MMA fighter, Anderson “The Spider” Silva, along with Steven Seagal. I am not here to try to explain why this commercial is so funny and memorable for me, as a huge Ultimate Fighting Championship fan, my goal in this post is to show the technique used in this ad, which is co-branding.

Co-branding has been used a lot as a marketing strategy to increase sales, however what in God’s green Earth is this? Well, you are completely right asking this question, and here I am to answer it. You must have seen some commercial on a TV or in a poster where there were two brands on the same ad, such as the UFC and Budweiser in the video above, therefore you know what is this technique; co branding is a marketing partnership made by two or more different brands to join forces to promote their products or services together. This technique is becoming more popular, because it can help the companies to combine their loyal costumers, their strengths and also share the promotional expenses. Each brand has the opportunity to move outside of their own costumer base, catching the attention of the costumers of other popular and well-known brand.

According to Chang, from the Journal of American Academy of Business, there are three different levels of co-branding.

• ·      Market Share: A company joins forces with another one to penetrate the market.
• ·      Brand Extension: Companies join forces in order to extent the brands’ current market share.
• ·      Global Branding: Companies try to achieve people around the world, by combining forces.

There are also different types of co-branding, companies can use ingredient co-branding, which is to use another companies’ products within your product, such as Dell computers with Intel processor, Pillsbury brownies with Nestle chocolate, among others.

Another type is cooperative co-branding that is when two companies join forces to create a new product, service or brand. One great example is Sony and Ericsson, because they joint forces to create Walkman and Cyber-Shot phones.

The last one is complementary co-branding, which is when two or more companies working together to encourage co-consumption and co-purchases, a great example of these methods is the Apple Store that sells Sennheiser’s headphones.

However, co-branding is not perfect, obviously there are some advantages, such as risk sharing, resource sharing, greater costumer trust in the product, technological benefits, among others. Nevertheless, there are some points that can be negative, such as loss of communication between the companies, negative feedback effects, and risk of brand equity dilution, among others.

Well, that was the post about co-branding; I hope you guys enjoyed this one. Feel free to leave a comment or a suggestion. As Arnold Schwarzenegger once said: “I’ll be back”, sooner than later I expect.

Thanks guys, so long and may the force be always with you,

Leo.

References:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mR0jAp2Z-lE

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51cMykFZmkL._SX425_.jpg

http://cdn2.gsmarena.com/vv/pics/sonyericsson/sonyericsson-w810-00.jpg

http://www.managementstudyguide.com/co-branding.htm

https://9to5mac.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/gallery-3.jpg

http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/jul2009/sb20090710_255169.htm

Blog 7: Breaking the Fourth Wall - Part 2

Hello people,

How are you doing? I hope everything is good with you. I am thinking about continue to the part two of the “Breaking the Forth Wall”, and that is exactly what I will do. In case you did not read my last post, in the movie industry, the expression “breaking the forth wall” is used when a character in the movie starts talking to the audience, basically when he admits he is in the movie. However this is an expression that can be used for any time a movie stop being just frames on a screen and become part of our lives, basically when a movie get out of the screen and you somehow, someway, end up being a part of the movie in the real life. In the last few years, this has been used to promote movies, as a shown on my last post the Dead Man Down prank was made so that people could feel like they were witnessing a murder, so that we viewers of the prank could see these people’s reaction to that. This situation being a part of the movie, made a movie situation be a part of people lives, this is break the fourth wall. This was a great marketing campaign having more than 7million views. In today’s post I will talk about two other pranks made it to promote movies, both made for horror movies, so get ready, things are going to get a little bit scary…or funny, depend on how you look at it. Let’s go!

This is the first prank with more than 2 million views on YouTube:

This was a prank made to promote the movie Ouija, a horror movie that premiered in 2014; therefore it is a really recent movie. This is a great market action, because people will remember this pranks whenever they watch a trailer or see a poster for this movie, making them curious about going to the movie theater and actually watching the movie itself.

The Ouija prank has only 3 million views, the next one went viral, you probably watched it already, and your friends probably did it too.

This prank made to promote the remake of the movie Carrie which premiered in 2013, was all over the Internet, it has over 61 million views, and yes you read this correctly, 61 million views. The movie made $84790678, proving that this marketing campaign was really successful, this is a movie based on a novel written by Stephen King, however during the time of the marketing for this movie, the only thing me and my friends talked about was this commercial, the prank and how awesome was it, basically we went to watch this movie in the theater because of this ad. It definitely affected my purchase decision process, along with a great amount of people that went to watch this movie, because of this great marketing campaign.

So, that is it for today. I hope you guys enjoyed this post. Feel free to comment anything you want. Thanks for reading my blog, and see you on the next post.

Take care,

Leo.

Reference:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ncQN_7I7hk&index=3&list=WL

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlOxlSOr3_M

http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=carrie2013.htm