Friday, April 13, 2018

Week 2 Listening Exercise

I chose to see what people on Twitter were saying about Target. Target's value proposition is their low prices and their strive for there customers to "expect more" from them. To the best of my knowledge Target is pretty popular and well liked but apparently not as popular this week. An actor named John Barrowman went into a Target in the LA area with the intention of buying a 40$ gift card a shirt and a coat for a homeless man and was lectured by an employee who said it was against policy for the purchase to be made for a homeless person. As most people do when they have had a bad experience with a company these days Barrowman took to twitter.
Basically everyone got pissed. Some people (including Barrowman) went as far as to say that they would potentially stop shopping at Target all together. The Twitter page Ask Target responded to Barrowman's initial tweet stating that there was no such policy and that they were handling the matter. As a company I feel this kind of media attention especially when the  person involved is famous can be really damaging to the company's image. I feel like its good that they responded to his tweet but I also feel maybe a more formal public apology might help show the public that this is not  how Target wants to treat there customers.

Friday, April 6, 2018

Marketing Post #1

Topic 1: About Me

What prompted me to enroll in this class is because it is required for my degree. Although what interested me about this class is that marketing is a topic that I don't know much about and if I want to own a business one day its a topic that I feel I should have a better understanding about.

I am getting my Associates Degree in Practical Business Management. I chose this because I wanted to make sure as a business owner that I have the basic knowledge on how to run a business.

I am interested in learning as much as I can about marketing. As I said I don't know much about it but I am ready to absorb as much as I can about it in the next 10 weeks.

Outside of school I am passionate about history. I could go with an obvious answer and say that I am passionate about baking because I want to own a bakery but even more than that I love researching and finding out more about historical events.


Topic 2: Starbucks changing their Frappuccino promotion

As a daily coffee drinker when I saw that Starbucks was changing one of there biggest promotions I wanted to know more. In 2010 Starbucks started offering Happy Hour a seasonal promotion that offered half price frappuccino's at a certain time of day for two weeks in May.  Over the last few years the sales during this promotion have slowly gotten worse and worse.

On April 5 of this year msn.com posted an article titled "Why did Starbucks change this Frappuccino promotion?" explaining what the change entails and the reasoning behind it. Instead of just completely dropping the promotion they decided to re-brand it. Happy Hour now will occur at random times throughout the year and the actual promotion will include more than just Frappuccino's. The catch is that this new Happy Hour promotion is now by "invitation only" meaning only Starbucks reward members will get this code. If you are not a member but still want in on the promotion you can visit Starbucks.com/ HappyHour and sign up to get the code through your email. As well as re-branding the once great promotion Starbucks has also decided to give any user signing on to their Wi-Fi the option to enter their email and never have to sign in again at any company-owned store.

Starbucks is implementing a product relaunch and I think they have a good chance at bringing  up sales and feeling out which promotions do better in which areas. The unique thing about this relaunch is that they can try out many different drink promotions without the promotion lasting to long and stores can then take that information to see which promotions the public is responding to better. If I worked for the Starbucks marketing team I would suggest instead of just random times during the year to maybe have them scheduled for certain times in the month and make sure when customers get access to the code they also get those dates so as many people as possible can take advantage of the deals. Overall I think that Starbucks has a really great plan set in motion and I cant wait to see if sales do actually come up. After reading this article I have learned that even large companies need to keep there products relevant or sales will drop.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/why-did-starbucks-change-this-frappuccino-promotion/ar-AAvvbfd?ocid=spartanntp

https://happyhour.starbucks.com/?utm_source=syrupshroud&utm_medium=instore&utm_campaign=happyhour&utm_term=url


Week 2 Listening Exercise

I chose to see what people on Twitter were saying about Target. Target's value proposition is their low prices and their strive for ther...