Marketing Munchies

It can be difficult for business executives to fully understand the attitudes customers have towards their brand. This can lead to poor business choices, like when SeaWorld started their forum, “Ask SeaWorld”, after the Blackfish documentary was released in attempts to be transparent with the public. The public had been demanding answers from SeaWorld, and the way the company responded made way for the company to be criticized in a big way. A way that SeaWorld could have avoided the disaster of “Ask SeaWorld” is to have conducted a sentiment analysis (Reed, 2015). A sentiment analysis, or opinion mining, is a way to use online mentions to determine the attitudes and emotions tied to your brand or business from customers. It is useful in sensing the subtle changes in opinions towards a brand in order to improve product lines and services. Sentiment analysis are conducted by an algorithm taking into account inflections in voice, rate of speech, and responses to customer service advi...

It’s no secret that colleges bombard potential students with an endless stream of letters, emails, and phone calls. During my senior year of high school, it seemed like I got a new brochure, email, or letter from some university every other day trying to get me to apply . In my and many of my classmates' case, this type of marketing had no effect on where we went to school. So, if mass marketing isn’t gaining universities more students, why are they still spending so much of their budget on this? Universities are spending about 20% of their tuition revenues on admissions and recruiting efforts (Katzman, 2016). With a push for universities to lower their prices, universities must find better more cost efficient way of reaching students. Direct mail is a huge expense on a universities budget. Even though it is such a strain on marketing budgets it is what has been traditionally used and is still effective in getting a university’s name into the hands and minds of prospective stu...