Final Blog Reflection

As the semester comes to a close, it is time for me to write my final blog; this blog will review everything I have learned and experienced throughout writing this blog as well as taking my marketing course in general. I feel as though I was able to gain some valuable knowledge pertaining to marketing while analyzing the marketing strategies of Barstool Sports as a business. Studying the habits of Barstool's employees I was able to learn a lot more about target markets and social media marketing than I might have in just a classroom setting. Because Barstool targets a specific demographic, mainly high school and college males, they utilize the entities that these people are most familiar with to market their products. Their marketing costs are very low because they do a lot of marketing through social media, mainly Twitter, but also Facebook and Instagram.

Obviously, the marketing strategy analysis for a different company would be vastly different from Barstool's. Barstool is very good at adapting their marketing strategies and efforts to identify with their specific target market. However, if a different company, take Apple for example, were to only market using Barstool's strategies, then they would most likely not be as successful as they are today. Even though I only analyzed one company throughout this blog, I have learned certain ways to evaluate and analyze the marketing strategies of a variety of different businesses.

Through analyzing Barstool Sports, and specifically owner David Portnoy, I have gained useful information on how to persuade a target audience. Portnoy is somewhat of a king at this. In my previous blog post, you can see how he uses humor to promote his Black Friday sale. Humor is a common theme used by Portnoy and Barstool because they know that is what their target market wants to hear. If your company is marketing towards high school and college students, it would be a smart idea to use humor and jokes to market your business. However if your target audience is elderly people, you are going to want to use a more serious approach in marketing your products, because they most likely respond less positively to humor tactics.

In addition to the Blog project, I was able to gather a lot of experience and knowledge through the team Practice Marketing project. The goal of this project was to sell backpacks in an online simulation of a market. While this was a perfect, real-world simulation, I was actually able to learn quite a bit of useful marketing information from it. For instance, I was able to advance and progress my teamwork and team-building skills. By being put in random teams, I was forced to work with people I had not worked with prior to this class. We were thrown into the project together and we had to make decisions about our simulated business almost immediately. We worked well together and the entire project went smoothly.

Another very important skill the Practice Marketing project was able to teach was how to produce financial statements using Microsoft Excel. We had to make an income statement a third of the way through the game, and then again for the final report. Making these income statements were an easy way of laying the company's finances out in an easy-to-interpret style where we could easily analyze our company's finances and recognize any changes that could have been made to improve our business. I volunteered to produce the final and cumulative income statements for our project and it almost came naturally to me. I found it very interesting how simple it was to collect such data. Using simple formulas we were able to easily calculate all the financial numbers that were relevant to our company; such as revenue, costs, net income, break-even point, market share, etc.

I believe that the two major projects we conducted in this class were extremely beneficial to my learning and really helped to advance my skills in the marketing world. Thanks for reading!

Barstool Sports on Black Friday

As you all know, Black Friday is a day in which people all over the nation go shopping, seeking to find the best deals on products of all kinds. Black Friday is a great marketing technique for companies or retailers to move mass amounts of products. By offering an enticing bargain on one product, they are able to get more customers into the store and many of those customers will buy other products as well, specifically complimentary products to the item being sold at bargained price. Black Friday sales are also used by companies to move excess products that they want to get rid of to make room in their inventory for the newer year's models.

Barstool Sports utilizes Black Friday sales to their advantage as well. Even though they sell products solely online, they are still able to move mass amounts of products. Dave Portnoy offered all of their merchandise at 20% off for 24 hours on Black Friday. The already popular T-shirt sales skyrocketed for that day. People were buying more products than they might have usually bought if there wasn't a sale. Since T-shirts are relatively easy and cheap to produce, Portnoy can afford to slash prices drastically for a short while in order to boost revenue.

Another brilliant marketing technique utilized by Portnoy was the fact that he was complaining about the sale all day long. He would say things like "stop buying shirts, I'm going to go bankrupt." This was a smart move because people began to tweet him screenshots of their order confirmations, and Portnoy would say another funny, sarcastic comment. These interactions on Twitter enabled Barstool to show potential customers who might have been on the fence all the various orders other people were purchasing. It is possible that if they saw someone spend $120 on two sweatshirts, a T-shirt, and a hat, they could justify themselves for buying a shirt or two.

As time was winding down on the sale, Portnoy tried to get a few last minute customers to buy a shirt. Portnoy tweeted things like "Only 60 minutes until this nightmare is over" and "not even gonna mention that Black Friday ends in 6 minutes cause I don't want to remind people they got 6 minutes left to murk me" in order to remind customers who were late recognizing the sale or someone who had been thinking about it all day. Portnoy was also able to get #prayforpres to trend on twitter, as people were tweeting this to support Portnoy's (pretend) bankrupcy. I'm sure these tactics were able to influence a few extra sales for Barstool Sports.

Barstool's Brand Loyalty

Barstool Sports has a very loyal fan base, its users tend to visit multiple times a day and are loyal to the company's merchandise, especially their shirts. In a recent article published by Business Wire, Katherine Saviola describes the benefits of Barstool's customer loyalty following their partnership with Revcontent in June, 2015. Revcontent is a fast-growing advertising network that provides content recommendations to users online.

The Vice-President at Revcontent was quoted as saying, "Our partnership with Barstool Sports aims to deliver engaging content relative to their wide audience of loyal readers. We're excited to work with such an influential brand to further our content recommendation goals." This statement continues to emphasize Barstool's brand loyalty. Their readers are very loyal to their company because they feel they can easily relate to their writers. 

"Barstool generates 6.7 million unique visitors a month with 200 million monthly pageviews. Founded by David Portnoy, Barstool Sports has millions of loyal users around the globe. Their quality content and industry leadership is proven with their average session duration of 10 minutes and a 70% completion rate for original video content." -Saviola

Source: Barstool Sports Enters Exclusive Partnership with Revcontent

The Segmentation of Barstool Sports

Hello everyone and welcome back to the blog that reviews and analyzes the marketing strategies of Barstool Sports. As I believe was mentioned in previous post, Barstool has done a great job of branching out to other major cities across the United States. Barstool Sports originally started based in Boston, run by Dave Portnoy, but has many different branches currently. These branches include New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, DMV (Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia), Iowa, BarstoolU, and their newest branch, Barstool Dixie.

Barstool Sports has segmented their different franchises using geographic segmentation. There are five general criteria to be considered when segmenting a company:

1. Simplicity and cost-effectiveness of assigning potential buyers to segments
2. Potential for increased profits
3. Similarity of needs of potential buyers within a segment
4. Difference of needs of buyers among segments
5. Potential of a marketing action to reach a segment

For Barstool, the only cost to creating segments in different regions of the country is employing people in those regions to run the operation. Since it is an online based company it is very easy to group content into segments in order for viewers to find the region they are interested in. The potential for increased profit through this segmentation is clear, by grouping content and sales promotions into groups, customers can find the region they are interested in, and view merchandise pertaining to their interests. By separating Barstool's content geographically, they can recognize different groups of people who may only be interested in certain segments. For instance, people living in New York tend to view the New York page mostly, and buy merchandise relating to their sports teams. Additionally, customers in different regions do not share the same interests, and separating the segments makes the viewer experience more friendly and easy to navigate. Finally, by segmenting this way, Barstool increases the effectiveness of each marketing action made in each city. 

Barstool Sports Teaming up with DraftKings

Because of Barstool's success and wide outreach towards consumers, companies with the same target market, offering different products often attempt to team-up with Barstool to help promote their products. The most notable partnership with Barstool is their one with DraftKings. DraftKings is a company that offers daily fantasy games to customers who don't want to be locked in to a full season of fantasy sports. The daily fantasy market has grown exponentially over the past few years, and Barstool jumped on that train relatively early. Last year, at the 2014 Super Bowl between the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks, Barstool maintained a huge presence leading up to the game.

Since DraftKings is a daily fantasy game, they could not offer a contest for the Super Bowl alone, however, they still wanted to have a presence felt in the weeks leading up to the "big game". Instead of a fantasy contest, DraftKings partnered with Barstool to offer a prize package including tickets to the Super Bowl. The contest was a $100 buy-in with 20 prizes of cash, and 1 grand prize package winner. The package included:

· Airfare + 4 Nights Hotel for you and a guest
· 2 Tickets to the “Big Game”
· Party Bus Friday Night with El Pres and the Barstool guys
· 2 Tickets to the Victoria’s Secret “Leather and Laces” party on Saturday Night
· $500 Spending Money

DraftKings sponsors many Barstool events and in exchange, DraftKings is able to advertise on Barstool's website. Followers and fans of Barstool don't seem to mind, as many of them are also users of DraftKings' services. DraftKings is able to get their logo and name out there for their target market to see, while Barstool is able to gain the funding to put on certain events that may otherwise not be able to happen. Recently, Barstool has been able to put on a cross-country RV roadtrip on the "Barstool Dixie Bus" visiting various college campuses for college football games throughout their travels. DraftKings helped to sponsor this branch of Barstool and they are able to get their logo on the bus and have their presence felt at college campuses and college football games, a huge part of their target market. In this case of partnership, both parties are able to gain advantages and maintain a healthy relationship. 

Utilizing Sporting Events to Move Merchandise

As many of you may know, the Chicago Cubs and the New York Mets recently faced off against each other in the 2015 NLCS. While Barstool President David Portnoy is based out of Boston, Barstool has branches in both the Chicago and the New York markets. Portnoy teamed up with Dan Katz and Kevin Clancy, the Barstool reps in Chicago and New York respectively, to make a special on the matchup of the two teams and promote T-shirts that these markets, and even casual fans, might want to purchase. They attended a game in New York, then drove in their Barstool RV to Chicago to attend a game there as well. Barstool taped much of their journey and produced a video summarizing their travels that would peak interest in potential consumers.

Link to the video: http://www.barstoolsports.com/boston/encore-of-the-big-cat-vs-kfc-in-chicago-for-the-nlcs/
Disclaimer: Contains Some Strong Language

Not only were the three men seen joking around with each other, but they made sure to display much of their merchandise pertaining to the two teams they were highlighting. Portnoy even went as far as wearing about 15 shirts to the games in hopes of selling a few. He featured products from both markets such as:

The video did not mention how successful Portnoy was at selling these products at the actual game but offered amazing advertisement for the various products. Another segment in the video captured the men walking down the streets of Chicago where they encountered a copycat "yabo" T-shirt in a store window. They were quick to ridicule the store and point out that they had the first version.

Often times during games, when the T.V. cameras would pan over the crowd you were able to distinguish a Barstool shirt or hat in the stands, and the Barstool team would capture that in a Vine and post it to social media to show their products. This is great free advertisement for Barstool, showing people how fans from their team's market are wearing Barstool's clothing and that maybe they should grab some too.

Another thing that Barstool has been utilizing to their advantage, specifically in the Chicago and New York markets, is promotion after a team win. After a team from either city won a game Barstool would offer all of that team's merchandise for 20% off for an hour after the game. This is a very smart promotional technique, using the fans' excitement after a win to sell more merchandise. In the heat of the moment, adrenaline pumping, some fans would see this deal and immediately jump on it, purchasing one, or a maybe a few shirts or hats. All in all, Barstool has done a wonderful job using sports to help advertise their products. Barstool spends virtually no money on advertising and somehow get their products view-able to potential customers.

How Barstool Uses Primary Data to Market Their Products

In the previous post, the background and general information of Barstool Sports was discussed. In this post, a closer look into how Barstool is able to tailor their products to customers' current interests. Barstool is known for their success in T-shirt and merchandise sales. The question is, however, how do they get to be so successful in sales? How do they continue to create new ideas and stay relevant in an extremely competitive market?

The answer to these questions may be a a simple one, this being the mere fact that Barstool pays attention to their customers and what they have to say. Barstool has a huge social media presence, specifically on Twitter. Every member of the Barstool team utilizes Twitter, interacting with fans from common men to professional athletes. Dave Portnoy (President of Barstool Sports) often uses Twitter to convey company information to customers as well as receive feedback from them.

Portnoy tweeted this on September 8, 2015 regarding a potential new T-shirt idea. He received positive feedback from customers on Twitter, getting well over 300 retweets and over 1,300 favorites on the initial tweet. Portnoy ended up making the shirt and sales have been great. Customers often tweet pictures of their order or of them wearing the shirt at Portnoy and he also does a good job of getting free advertisement by retweeting them. 

Further evidence that suggests Barstool Sports uses sources of primary data like social media is an article done by Adweek on September 21, 2015. This article listed and reviewed the top-ten media publishers in the month of August. While Barstool Sports didn't quite crack the top-ten, they did make an appearance in the article:

"Barstool Sports saw the highest growth of any publisher in the month of August at 125 percent."

Adweek measures social actions which encompasses all sources of social media, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, etc. It records things like tweets, retweets, favorites, likes, shares, comments, among others, and measures each company's growth over time. Not only did Barstool Sports record the highest growth rate in the month of August, they recorded the highest growth rate of any month ever. This is a very impressive feat, and shows that the already popular company is still on the rise. 

To summarize, Portnoy and the Barstool Sports team are able to use social media to interact with and receive feedback from their fans. They use this primary data to make business decisions to benefit their company and increase sales. Utilizing social media is a very inexpensive way to advertise, but can be quite effective when used in the right ways. 

Genesis: The Success of Barstool Sports

Welcome all! This blog has been created with the intended purpose of examining and reviewing the marketing strategies of the company, Barstool Sports. For background, Barstool sports is a company based solely online, but still seem to manage a huge offline presence in the U.S. Barstool's purpose is to take current events (not just sports) and report them using comical spins to appeal to their readers. Their logo is shown to the left. It is clear that their target market is predominately men in their late teen years into their late 20s. They have a huge presence over students in college, myself included. Barstool was created by the self-proclaimed common man, Dave Portnoy. Barstool started as a small sports blog just in the Boston area, however, it has since branched out to other areas such as Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore/ Washington D.C. area, Iowa, as well as having a portion of their company devoted solely to the appeal of college students known as BarstoolU.

Dave Portnoy, founder of Barstool Sports, showing his
comedic side as he claims he is just a common man

While Barstool's website and articles are free to access and read, their profits come largely from the sale of merchandise, including T-shirts, sweatshirts, shorts, hats, flags, etc. Barstool Sports, and especially Portnoy, have an incredible ability to recognize and exploit current events and niche markets to create and sell T-shirts. For example, in Boston, people are very passionate about the sports teams, and so is Barstool. They use prominent moments or things players say in an interview to create T-shirts that people will want to buy.

In light of the recent accusations brought down upon New England Patriot's quarterback Tom Brady, Portnoy took a leadership role in the support of Brady while he fought (and eventually beat) the NFL in court to vacate his suspension. Portnoy recognized the fact that people in the Boston area would undoubtedly support their beloved quarterback who has brought them so much joy. He also realized that those same people would develop a dislike towards the people responsible for the suspension (the NFL and its commissioner Roger Goodell) as well as those responsible for slandering Brady's name (ESPN for example). Portnoy used this major story in sports to his advantage and was quite successful in marketing his products.

These are just three of the many shirts Portnoy and Barstool have created. The first, the Free Brady shirt, was created almost immediately after Brady was originally suspended by the league. The second shirt, the Goodell Clown shirt, was created to ridicule the league's commissioner for his lack of hard evidence justifying his suspension of Tom Brady. And the third, the ESPN Lies shirt, was revealed after ESPN leaked multiple false reports about Tom Brady and the whole situation in general. Portnoy gives the people what they want, and the people love it.

Here is a link to their website: Barstool Sports

Disclaimer: This blog is in no way affiliated with Barstool Sports. It is simply an analysis of their marketing strategies.