Blog 1: My First Time

Hi everybody! I want to start off by introducing myself. My name is Chris Williamson and I am from Middletown, New Jersey. Currently a sophomore at Saint Michael's College in Colchester, Vermont. Growing up in New Jersey has given me some great opportunities throughout my life. I am fortunate enough to live within a few miles of the beach and only an hour away from New York City and less than two hours away from Philadelphia. This has allowed exposed me to many different educational experiences due to the vast amount of experience and information around me. Luckily for me, my mom is able to help many of the dentists and oral surgeons that she works with through her job at Nobel Biocare to promote their business through social media, Google and their own websites. My aunt owns a girls accessories store called Groovy Girlz in a small South Jersey beach town called Sea Isle City. My aunt is able to use ads in local newspapers, commercials, social media and banners to promote her store. Through my mom and my aunt I have been lucky enough to learn some useful pointers on successfully marketing though social media as well as different forms of advertising.

While at St. Mike's, I am pursuing a degree in Business Administration with a minor in Media Studies. I am also a member of both the Soccer and the Water Polo teams so I had to quickly learn how to balance my time correctly. While at first it was difficult because I wanted to make friends, I quickly learned that hard way that while it is important to make lasting friendships you also need to always be thinking of your work or your grades because in the end, the better the grades the better the chances you have of landing your dream job.

Over the past year I have learned so much about myself. I changed my major, added a minor and learned how to equally balance my time so that I can succeed both inside and outside of the classroom. I hope that throughout my four years here St. Mike's I will be able to get the best education I could possibly get while also learning a lot from real world experiences.

Before I get ahead of myself, I just want to let everyone know that this is my first time writing a blog so please take it easy on me just this once. The reason that I am writing this blog is for my Marketing class at St. Mikes and throughout the semester, I will be writing a total of 10 blogs for my class.

On the first day of class, my professor asked the class to define the word marketing in our own words. The first thing that popped into my head was that marketing is when you promote your product, idea or organization to a group of people. The American Marketing Association or AMA defines the word marketing as "the activity for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that benefit its customers, the organization, its stakeholders, and society at large." While my definition encompasses part of the AMA's definition, we must also remember that our product, idea or organization is benefiting the people that we are promoting it to.

A key part of marketing is something that many people in the marketing field call the  marketing mix which is used when a company is trying to make consumers buy their product or service. The four main parts of the marketing mix or the four P's are price, product, place and promotion. Next time you watch a commercial or look at an ad you will realize that most likely they contain at least one of the four P's and many times will contain multiple. Lets look at this Southwest Airlines commercial to see how many of the four P's it contains.

First off, Southwest does a great job at using a little bit of humor to get their point across. In this commercial they are promoting their new inflight entertainment. Southwest was very smart when they decided to use a flight attendant named Marty who has been known to use humor while in the air. In fact videos of Marty's humor have gone viral online and she has been on television shows like Ellen. So you may be asking yourself, "how many of the four P's are shown in this commercial?" Well to answer your question, all of the four P's are shown in this commercial. I think that the one that many of picked up on very quickly is their product or the inflight entertainment that they offer for free from the comfort of your own mobile device. They are also showing the price and place of the entertainment which is on Southwest flights and it is free. They are promoting their new product through television ads like the one above. This commercial is unique because sometimes it is difficult to incorporate all of the four P's successfully into a commercial

I just want to thank everyone for reading my first blog post and I hope that you all will come back to read some more in the near future.

References:

Kerin, Roger A., Steven W. Hartley, and William Rudelius. Marketing. 11th ed. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill/Irwin, 2013. Print. 

Marketing. Digital image. Linkedin.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Jan. 2015. 

NutsAboutSouthwest. "Southwest Airlines Commercial: Quiet Landing." YouTube. YouTube, 7 Nov. 2014. Web. 25 Jan. 2015. 

Saint Michael's. Digital image. Www.schoolguides.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Jan. 2015.