Marketing Blog #5

As a university student with a tight budget, i always go to food court in ubc village to have my lunch and dinner. I remember that i saw a new store opened in the food court named Traditional Soup last year. And recently i saw it closed down and rerent the place to others. I never see many people in front of their store even when there are long lines in front every other stores. I think i might unfortunately noticed its whole product life circle.

At the Introduction period, sales will gradually increase and profit will increase from negative to positive. I think the Traditional Soup did this and there are several innovators who want to try the soup out. But i never saw they experience the Growth period and the Maturity period. I think they go straight to the Decline period. Why this happens. I think because the have not finish their STP process.

For their situational analysis, I think they successfully identified their opportunity there which is that there are no soup stores like them in the food court and people might want to try the new thing and this can also be their strength because they a new. But they still have weakness which is that they are new for only a short period and they are located at a corner of the food court which is hard for people to see. And threatens are already there, two best selling Chinese food store there.

There product is soup, which i consider will not be enough for my lunch, but they still sell at around $5. So i consider their target market as people who want a soup after lunch or who just want snack soup(maybe they do not think this is their target market). But who are the people go to food court? I think they are mainly students who just want to have a cheap and quick lunch. People who have the spare money might go to white spot and other places like that which locate at center of UBC. So we can assume, their target customer never goes to food court, so they can hardly find the Traditional Soup.

However, if they make some promotion at the introduction period, making their product more accessible and give free trials, they may let more people know about their store. But they did nothing to promote their store which can not turn their innovators to early adopters. Thus, the diffusion of innovation just stopped there, making themselves unknown to their market. I believe that is the main reason that leads to their failure.

Blog #4

NBA fans will discover that when they log onto NBA.com to watch game highlights or top plays, ads will appear during the loading time. And it is strange to find that half of the ads are for female fans. There are a lot of ads advertising products for female and soap and tissue which should be targeting housewife who will often purchase this product. This is strange but is reasonable and appropriate. Why? I do not understand before i took the marketing course. When our professor mentioned that NFL research illustrates that half of their fans are female, it is not hard to understand why they advertise like this. I feel like they segmented their market into product for male and product for female, and then sell their rights to advertise to them. This is just a website strategy of NBA and it is beyond lots of people's imagination. Also, I think NBA has a large portion of female fans because their ads for female product are more than ads for male products.

I also want to talk about NBA's community involvement as an marketing strategy. They have a NBA Cares program which encourage each team to help their community to help children who are disabled or mentally disabled and give them care. This move shows NBA's value of sports is to make people healthy and never ever give up. I believe that this move will bring NBA at least two main benefits. First of all, they show their care for their fans or people who are not even their fans. So NBA fans when be loyal to them in return and they may even develop from loyal fans to people who advocate NBA which is a really powerful marketing tool--word of mouth. Secondly, they mainly help children and young people which may help NBA discover potential fans and develop them into their long term customers.

Marketing Blog #3

As we come into Feb, the NBA all star weekend is coming. NBA is using the all star weekend to work as a promotion and marketing method.

All the top NBA stars will crowd in LA this February. The all star game is more a show than regular games and people can vote for their favourite players who them want to play in the team. This can be considered as an reward for fans' support for the whole year and the voting process can be considered as a co-creation which will increase customer satisfaction. This shows that NBA is an value-driven organization because it pay attention to the long term relationship with customers and evolves all the time. But apparently it is not for free, people have to either buy tickets or buy TV passes to watch the whole NBA all star weekend. In this case, the game can be considered as an highly differentiated goods and can use value based pricing because people will value it more than regular games.

This is pretty much a routine for NBA and its fans, but NBA is still trying to do better. For example, on NBA.com, there still is some quick survey about how fans think about the all star weekend and the selected players. They are still doing marketing research about their customers and trying to improve their services and "product". Also those players in the all star game are role models or favourite players of millions of people. Even players not playing the game ( either injured cannot play or not selected) can be significantly influential. This can be a social factor of reference group that affect consumers purchasing behaviour. Those players are aspirational indirect reference group which can encourage more people to watch the game. And also, when they play the game, players will make athletic moves which will bring fans great excitement which can act as an affective influence that affect customers psychological needs.