Blog Post 8 - Reflection

Over the course of the semester, I have learned a lot in my marketing class taught by Professor Nelson. Throughout the course, I learned about the ways marketing affects our decisions to buy products every day and they amount of research and thought that is put into marketing, which I had never really thought about before. After reading Buyology, I quickly learned how much marketing was affecting my everyday life. It taught me how much time companies take to research and learn about the consumer in order to target their marketing towards them. It’s important for the employees at each company to know their consumer as well because it gives them a better understanding of what their function is within the market.

Understanding marketing is a long-term task. While we can cover a large majority of the material in class, we won’t fully understand it until we put it into practice like we did throughout the course of the semester. With the simulation, we were able to select a target market and work on advertising and customizing our product to their specific needs and wants which helped us grow our company more. It was interesting to look at the turn-by-turn decisions and how they affected our financial status and figure out how these decisions hurt or helped our strategy. It was also helpful to put this information into presentation and report format which allowed us to get practice with the formality of the business world.

One of the best ways to learn and achieve is to set goals. We did this as a team with our simulation groups through setting goals about the outcomes we wanted out of our projects. We had to write up a memo about the goals we wanted to achieve and worked towards these with each decision we made by analyzing our current standing and tweaking our strategy slightly in order to achieve our goals. In order to engage in our class, one of the best things to do was to bring in marketing news. I loved this because of how easy it was to find this information. We were able to discuss it and relate it to what we were learning in class.

Overall, I was able to learn a lot about myself as well as marketing throughout this semester. Learning about the ethical issues marketing managers’ face with how sex sells as well as the general marketing concepts helped me grasp how important marketing is to the business world.

Blog Post 7: NFL

On January 18, 2015, the New England Patriots showed up ready for the AFC Championship Game in Foxborough, Massachusetts against the Indianapolis Colts. After the absolute beat down by the Patriots, the Colts claimed that they had information regarding a ball deflating scheme which was intended to aid the Patriots and that Tom Brady was at the head of the entire thing. Needless to say, the Patriots went on to win the Super Bowl in a thrilling ending with Malcolm Butler’s interception at the goal line to win. Since then the NFL has had a really tough time.

Roger Goodell

On May 11, Roger Goodell, the NFL Commissioner decided he was going to flex his nonexistent muscles and try to show Tom Brady and the Patriots who’s boss. He dealt the Patriots a loss of a few draft picks, and dealt Tom Brady a four game suspension for the 2015 season. This all came crashing down once the Wells Report was released and debunked and ripped apart by multiple world renowned scientists. This already didn’t look good for the NFL and it only got worse from there when Tom Brady appealed the suspension. The case ended up in Federal Court where a judge ruled that it was an unfair punishment (the fair, according to the NFL rule book is a fine “including but not limited to” $25,000) which resulted in Tom Brady loosing almost $1.8 million for the punishment decided by Roger Goodell.

Since these events, Tom Brady started the season on a 10-0 winning streak proving that he’s one of, if not the best quarterbacks of all time. This made the NFL look really bad as well by showing that Tom Brady didn’t need slightly deflated footballs to win a game in which the majority of the points scored were in the second half, when the underinflated balls were inflated. But on top of that, Goodell can’t help but make himself look worse and worse with all of the terrible calls made by the referees this season. Tom Brady and the Patriots have lost an NFL record 360 yards due to penalties. A lot of these penalties aren’t valid and it’s causing a lot of media coverage of these blatant issues people have with the referees calls.

The NFL has had their fair share of controversy surrounding it for the past few years. With issues like the Ray Rice domestic abuse issue, the Saints and their headhunting operation going on, and even with spygate, the NFL can’t seem to win. They’re constantly in the news for negative things that are going on. Roger Goodell seems to be a large part of the problem with the NFL as well. Over the past few years, any issues that have risen are usually exacerbated by Goodell, who is known for his erratic, unfair punishments. With all of the sports analysts constantly debating over what Goodell’s next horrific move is going to be, the NFL is treating on thin ice with a lot of its viewers. While the Super Bowl is one of the most watched sports events in the world, the NFL is losing its credibility fast with no prospect of turning it around any time soon.

Blog Post 6: Under Armour

In the tennis world, a few companies dominate the tennis apparel industry. Nike, Adidas, Head, and Wilson are some of the largest companies. Every company has professional players on the pro tour who they sponsor. For example, Nike sponsors Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Serena Williams, and Genie Bouchard among others. It is a great way for these companies to advertise their brand through people purchasing the gear used by their favorite pro player. Nike and Adidas have the largest market share compared to the rest of the companies. This is the case in the sports industry as a whole as well. Except for one exception.

Under Armour is starting to make a name for itself in the sports world. Whether it’s football, baseball, or even just training in general, Under Armour makes sports equipment for everything and they’re growing fast. At the beginning of 2015, Andy Murray signed a contract with Under Armour for a 4-year sponsorship deal. This included all of his apparel which was huge for Under Armour since they were trying to break into the international sports market as a whole. And of top of that, they were trying to break into the tennis market because of their small presence in the tennis world. Under Armour is also sponsoring Sloane Stevens who plays tennis in the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA).

While breaking into a market in the 21^st century is getting easier due to the easy access to new products, Under Armour is still in the introduction phase in the tennis market. So far, Andy Murray is wearing tennis specific clothing and tennis shoes. But the products available to the general public aren’t the same. The “tennis shorts” aren’t tennis specific which makes them less desirable to the die-hard tennis players. In fact, they are just everyday shorts produced by Under Armour. Once Under Armour breaks away from their everyday athletic apparel and design some tennis specific clothing, I think that their brand will take off in the tennis market, just like it has for every other athletic discipline.

One product that they have been developing is their tennis shoes. So far, Under Armour has produced a few prototypes for Andy Murray that he’s been wearing in some pretty big competitions. In June and July of this past summer, Andy Murray debuted a new pair of Under Armour tennis shoes when he stepped on court at Wimbledon. Under Armour had been working with Andy Murray for a couple of months in order to create a pair of tennis shoes that he could wear at arguably the most historic Grand Slam in tennis. It was a bold move since they still hadn’t developed a pair of tennis shoes for hard court.

When the US Open rolled around, Under Armour still hadn’t been able to make the proper tennis shoe for Andy Murray so he wore his typical Adidas Barricade 8’s. This was a huge deal for Under Armour and Adidas. Andy Murray’s previous sponsor was Adidas which caused a lot of hype around the shoes. Adidas tweeted a picture of Andy Murray wearing Adidas tennis shoes with the caption “You can choose armour, or you can choose a weapon. #ImpactTheGame”. This was a huge move for Adidas and it was bad news for Under Armour. With no way to respond but to make it the last time Andy Murray wore Adidas shoes, Under Armour got busy finalizing the designs for Andy Murray’s hard court tennis shoes. They finished these in time for the ATP World Tour Finals, a big year-end event in which the top 8 tennis players in the world square off and compete for the final tournament of the tennis season. This was a big deal for Andy Murray and Under Armour since they were finally able to find a shoe that worked for him. I have a feeling that will be the last time that Andy Murray wears Adidas shoes which is a big win for Under Armour. Now, Under Armour just has to mass produce these shoes and make them available to the public. This will really help them out since people consider Under Armour’s gear more durable and higher quality than that of its competitors. This will help them out tremendously as they try to expand their market share in the tennis apparel market.

Blog Post 5: Facebook after French Terrorism

After the ISIS attacks in Paris, France on November 13th, Facebook opened a feature on their social media site that allowed people in Paris to mark themselves safe. Once someone in Paris had marked themselves safe, it sent a notification to all of their friends letting them know that they were safe from harm. This feature was brilliant and was actually designed by Facebook in the event of a natural disaster. Facebook never planned to use this feature for a terrorist attack, but it was a quick response from Facebook that allowed them to mobilize this feature and put everyone’s nerves at ease. Within a few days of the attack on Paris, there were also attacks in Beirut, Lebanon and a few other locations in the Middle East such as Baghdad, Iraq. Facebook didn’t do anything for these horrible disasters though. And because of this, Facebook received a lot of backlash.

Facebook's website and mobile app with the Safety Check feature

In the United States, everyone feels the need to be constantly connected to everyone around them through the use of technology. One of the main ways that people do this is through the use of Facebook and other social media outlets like Twitter and Instagram. Facebook has an advantage over these companies, though. Facebook was able to capitalize on the number of members it has because of how early it came out. Facebook was the first of the major media outlets and now has 1.55 billion active monthly users.

A few limitations of Instagram and Twitter are the causes that so many people prefer Facebook to these other outlets. Instagram requires that you post a picture in order to post anything. While it’s nice to scroll through your feed and look at everyone’s pictures, it’s not always the most effective form of communication through social media. Twitter’s biggest downfall is the fact that you have to keep your tweets to a maximum of 140 characters. This is tough for a lot of people who want to write long posts, especially anything of political nature. Facebook has every feature that Instagram and Twitter has, and then some. With the ability to chat built into the service, the ability to post pretty much anything, and the ability to create groups for anything you’re involved in, Facebook has a lot more practical use for most people as compared to many other social media outlets.

However, this comes at a hefty price as well. Since Facebook has everything that other outlets don’t have, people expect that it will have everything they want. This causes issues for Facebook in times like the terrorist attacks in France, Lebanon, and Iraq among others. People lashed out at Facebook because of the filters that people could use on their profile pictures. They thought that it wasn’t fair for Facebook to choose to release a filter for France and completely disregard every other country. People also didn’t think it was fair that Facebook didn’t enable a feature which enabled users to mark themselves safe if they were close to the disasters in locations other than France. In ways, it’s understandable considering the largest usage is in first-world countries like the US, France, and other countries related to those. In the end, the safety check was a quick decision to help make sure people were safe, not to say that one set of lives mattered more than another. Facebook was also lucky because of how fast news changes now. With the rapidly changing stream of news that constantly bombards us, this whole issue blew over quickly and the bad PR that Facebook was receiving ended as quickly as it began.