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.