In Response to Suzanne Koval's Post

Are companies trying to reach a different target market by advertising during new TV programs?

I do believe that companies are seeing the increase of viewers of the Grammy's and are trying to broaden their target market.  These companies see an opportunity to gain customers through the awards show and are willing to pay the price of a 30 second commercial.  I also think that some are trying to save money.  The Grammy's may have less viewers but everything will have less viewers than the Super Bowl and paying $800,000 instead of 3.8 million is a good way to save money for your company.  

It's Gotta Be The Shoes

Michael Jordan turns 50 today and is the greatest basketball player in the history of the sport.  He was signed by Nike in 1984 and a perfect storm was made that created one of the best marketing opportunities ever.  Nike was a struggling company at the time and risked millions on an untested player.  They put all of their energy into marketing the Air Jordan's but it was the play of Michael that got people interested in the sneakers. Then in another stroke of brilliance they hired a director that only made one movie and trusted him to make an ad campaign that would sell.  Spike Lee as his character Mars Blackmon sold the hell out of each version of the Air Jordan's with the famous line "It's gotta be the shoes." Nike rolled the dice and lucked out by choosing the best player ever, and they chose a relatively unknown director to market their brand.  Now they basically own the market on basketball sneakers and people are still saying "I wanna be like Mike."

http://probasketballtalk.nbcsports.com/2013/02/15/its-gotta-be-the-shoes-how-nike-bet-on-jordan-jordan-bet-on-nike-and-both-won-big/

What do you think about Nikes strategy back then?  If you were making the decisions would you have made all those risks and put your company in jeopardy?

In Response to Joseph Maturo's blog

Do you think that it is worth these companies paying all this money for a commercial during the Superbowl? What is your opinions on this year's Superbowl commercials?

While I don't agree that it is worth why they would pay for a Super Bowl ad.  I think spending $4 million for 30 seconds could be possibly a terrible waste of money, but could be worth the risk in instances.  Most of these companies like Coca-Cola and Samsung have plenty of money so it wouldn't really be that big of a risk.  also over 100 million people will be watching so they will find a market for their product.  You just need a really creative commercial, one that you will remember for a long time.  This years commercials weren't particularly that great.  I don't remember most of them.  The ones that I liked were the Samsung commercials with Seth Rogan and Paul Rudd and the Mercedes commercial with Willem Dafoe as the devil.

Super Bowl advertising

The Super Bowl is one of the biggest television events of the year with over 100 million people tuning in.  So it is easy to see why companies spend a lot of money to get a spot during the broadcast.  For a 30 second commercial in this years Super Bowl cost almost 4 million dollars.  Comparing that to the $42,000 in the first Super Bowl shows just how far companies are willing to go to get their ads out.  To me it sees like 4 million is way to much for a commercial.  Especially now that everyone judges the commercials and if it falls flat that could end up being a huge waste of money.  Another way you can market your product now is through social media.  The example was when the power went out during the Super Bowl the twitter Oreo uses posted a picture making fun of the power outage.  It was cheap and didn't take long to make.

Do you think Super Bowl advertising is getting too expensive?  Does marketing on social networks help at all?

Costumer Value vs Costumer satisfaction

Is Costumer satisfaction and costumer value interdependent or mutually exclusive? Can satisfaction occur simultaneously with low value?

Costumer satisfaction as defined in our MKTG textbook "is the customer's evaluation of a good or service in terms of whether that good or service has met their needs and expectations."  While customer value is "the relationship between benefits and the sacrifice necessary to obtain them."  So based off that I believe that these two are interdependent.  If a product or service doesn't generate high enough value than the customer's satisfaction will most likely fall too.  An example of this could be how the way music has been played over the past 50 years.  Once record players were what people needed to buy to play music.  There was high customer value and it led to high satisfaction.  Then over the years new technologies have made playing music easier and more compact.  CD players took over and the sacrifice to have a record player was greater than the benefits so costumer value went down.  In the 21st century the Ipod was released and the value for that was high.  With that came the lowering of satisfaction of the CD player and all its problems were not enough to save it.  Soon something better than the Ipod will come out and the pattern will repeat.

What do you think about costumer satisfaction and value?  What ways do you think costumer satisfaction can happen with low costumer value?.