Reflection on the Year

For my last blog post I have to write a reflection about what I have learned throughout the year based off of some objectives from our syllabus. One of our objectives was to explore ethical issues that marketing manager face. I feel like we really did not cover anything on this other than the fraud going on at Jay Peak right now. Even so it’s not directly related to marketing at all. However I feel that my blog discussed a huge ethical issue of how marketers exploit our emotions to make us feel things and buy their products.

With every business class that I take in school I feel like I take away nothing from each class. Not because I don’t pay attention, but because I am never taught anything new. For three summers I managed a stand up paddle board shop on long island. My boss and I worked hard from the very beginning working to establish a name for us. We both got national certifications so we could market ourselves as the only certified paddle board shop on long island. We created various social media’s to be able to share pictures and different events that were going on. Our target market was literally everyone, male, female, toddlers, moms, grandpas, and everything else. Anyone is able to paddle board and we pushed our hardest to target each and every different group. We created mommy and me events to bring out the little kids to get them exploring with their moms. We had teen nights every Tuesday where teenagers got discount rentals and we even cooked food for them.

I no longer work at the paddle board shop because I am trying to start my life here in Vermont. However here is the link to the facebook page that we had created. On average we grew about 250 likes every summer. On top of that we have 25 reviews of us, and all 25 are five star reviews.

 https://www.facebook.com/huntingtonsupshack/?fref=ts

Taking business classes in school can be helpful, but I have yet to learn anything in any of my classes that I haven’t already known from having real world experience. Marketing is not hard at all, you just have to be passionate about what you are trying to sell and make it happen. 

How PS4 is Doing Better Than Xbox One

Ever since the original Xbox and PlayStation came out in the early 2000's there has always been the battle between groups of friends on which one to buy. Most recently the Xbox One and PS4 came out in November of 2013 and only seven days apart from each other, with PS4 coming out first. However there interesting thing is that PS4 has higher sales by about 50% and Sony spends less money are marketing than Microsoft does. So how is Sony doing better? Well it all comes down to the way that Sony markets their product as a console for hardcore gamers. The strive to give gamers the best gaming experience while Microsoft focuses on the Xbox One as a living room necessity. Here are two commercials that are from the original release of both systems, first let us examine the PS4 commercial.

If we examine this PS4 commercial we can clearly see that all they focus in is the greatness of games. Sony focused on showing us what games are awaiting us once the system launches. As we can clearly see Sony is purely focusing on the aspect of gaming on their system and not any other features of the PS4. 

Taking a look at the Xbox commercial we can see that Microsoft made the console for everyone to us, and focused on our wants. One of the key phrases that stuck out at me was that “you will have a relationship with your T.V.” Now to the ordinary person they might not have any idea what this means. However Xbox has this thing called Kinect and it allows us to use voice and hand commands to work the Xbox. Another interesting point they bring up is that they are using all of this data to boost our entertainment. Note that they say entertainment and not gaming. Microsoft wanted to focus on entertainment for the whole family, not just the hardcore gamer.

So how did all of this play out in the long run? Well there is about 55 million console worldwide and the PS4 makes up about 35.9 million of them. That leaves a measly 19 million Xbox Ones out there. When we look at marketing costs a year after the consoles release I found out that Microsoft spent around 47 million and Sony only about 30 million. How did Sony do so much better than Microsoft? I honestly think that it all comes down to how Sony marketed their product. There are more hardcore gamers out there than families that want an entertainment system. It is very easy just to pick up Netflix, Apple TV, or Amazon Fire as an entertainment program. I think if Microsoft targeted the hardcore gamers like Sony did than they would have had a better shot.