Social Listening

Social Listening

For this topic I chose Playstation. For their value proposition they claim to "make advanced hardware that enables the most talented developers to produce vanguard titles and set new standards in interactive entertainment." Mainly what people are saying about it has to do with PlaystationNetwork (their online service) undergoing unscheduled maintenance which has been happening frequently.
One person commented stating that "we pay so much for this service that only works half the time." Another person thought they deserved a refund, "At this rate we better be getting some refunds to make up for this unscheduled maintenance." While these people were pretty upset with Playstation, others focused on other things such as "The Division looks amazing I'm definitely going to preorder it." If I was the manager I would definitely need to deal with the maintenance problems that people are upset about. Depending on the situation and what actually is going on there isn't always a whole lot of information that you can provide to the public. At the very least the public needs to know that Playstation sees that there is a problem and is working to fix it. As a customer it would be nice to know that problem will be less frequent at some point in the future even if they can't give a specific amount of time. I would also consider giving people that have been subscribed for a while either a free month subscription, or a discount on future subscriptions or certain games. In the past when PlaystationNetwork was down for 23 days due to being "hacked" and personal information and accounts of millions of customers were compromised, Sony gave away various products to their customer base. Overall I think they can and will do a good job of addressing the problem and many of their customers are very pleased with the services and games to be released.

Question #2

Star Wars is rated M but marketed at small children. What can a parent do?

This article discusses the new Star Wars: The Force Awakens movie from the perspective of a parent. It talks about the struggle that some parents have had with the lack of spoilers for the movie. Many people are very big fans of Star Wars and don't want to know anything about the movie at all so that they can go into it ready to be surprised and engrossed by the movie. The movie is also marketed at a wide range of people and age groups and was marketed so well that it has been breaking box office records. There are references to the original movies which entice adults as well as toys that are made for children. The fact that the movie is marketed to children as well as being quite secretive means that adults don't quite know what the movie contains and therefore can't make a decision as to whether the movie is appropriate for their kids to watch. By this time however their kids are already hyped up and begging to see it. This article is interesting to me because it not only involves the fact that the movie is so heavily marketed, but it also involves one target audience (the hardcore fans wanting the movie to stay secretive) making the viewing experience of another target audience (the concerned parents) more difficult and problematic. 

About me

-I chose to enroll in this class because marketing always sounded interesting to me but I didn't know much about it. This seemed like a good class to take so I can see if I like it.
-No I'm not a business or marketing major.
-I want to learn about understanding the target market and the most effective ways to market the product or business to that targeted market.
-I've always been interested in music and it has been a big part of my life. I was in band since sixth grade playing the saxophone and I also play piano.