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!
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