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