Looking Lite ‘n’ Easy

Sponsorship in the AFL is a basic exchange of value between a club and a brand.

Relationships are developed based upon: financial support, relevance and a general fit/alignment between brand and club.

Some sponsorships make sense. Some don’t. Then there are those that make sense but for all the wrong and ironic reasons.

There are two such sponsorships in this year’s AFL season.

Richmond Football Club and Lite ‘n’ Easy is the first sponsorship gem.

This is a match made in observation humorist heaven. Richmond’s on field performances are woeful; they truly embody the words Lite ‘n’ Easy. To have a coach and his staff seated in a box surrounded by words that would be outlawed from their vocabulary is amusing (if not confusing).

The next sponsorship pokes an ironic finger at the sporting entity it supports.

OPSM and the AFL Umpires.

Fans always heckle the umpires. The subject of which is all about their ability (or lack thereof) to see. OPSM are trying to make light of it. Surely it’s a point of conversation (at home and in the media). OPSM provide customers with superior sight. Yet OPSM will not give AFL umpires the ability to make the right decision. 20/20 vision or not, umpires will continue to make mistakes. Lots of them. The question is whether or not disgruntled fans will begrudge just the umpires or the brand on their backs as well.

Lets Just Say That

Some sporting sponsorships are humorous against their will and some that do try may not have the last laugh.

Statistically Speaking

Here’s a slide from a lecture I recently attended.

Notice anything out of place… (Look at the date on the reference)

“Corkindale, et al 1989”

That’s statistics from 21 years ago!

I realize that not all statistics have a ‘use by date’. There are no lectures theatres where ageing statistics go to die. Well, there is the History faculty…

Even ‘old’ statistics in Business & Economics can serve a purpose. That said, trying to pass off 21 year old information as a modern trend is not right.

Lets Just Say That

I’ve potentially found the oldest statistic in a Monash Marketing lecture. I challenge anyone else to find better. (Seriously if you can send it in).

Just Super

Show of hands.

Who is sick of receiving ludicrous amounts of paper concerning their superannuation fund?

The goal of a Superannuation fund is to safeguard our future, so that we don’t become a burden on society. Yet they waste more paper than ‘Chopper' Read does trying to write children’s stories.

It is interesting that organisations with a sole purpose of securing our financial future could have so little concern for our environmental one.

A few short years ago the colour green was associated with envy, the army, money or St Patricks Day, oh and one type of tea. Nowadays every business entity in the western world has taken some action to reduce its carbon footprint or made tactical use of the ‘hot’ issue of global warming.

In short: everyone’s gone green. A colour has taken over the world.

If a company is not planting a tree for every thousand units it sells, then someone in the marketing department is not doing their job. What started off as a competitive advantage; ‘going green’ has turned into an industrial and societal ‘norm’. Brands are quickly shifting from strengthen themselves with acts of ‘green-ness’ to having to use the environment’s plight to maintain brand equity levels.

In what is fast becoming known as the ‘digital age’ of mankind, how can there be a small forest of Superannuation papers stacked upon my desk? Surely an email with a PDF attachment isn’t too much to ask for.

It’s all headed for the trash anyway.

At least an email will actually make it into a ‘recycle bin’

Superannuation is like lawn balls. Nobody under the age of fifty pays attention to it. And the few that do are consider social outcasts. That said, its still bloody important.

Lets Just Say That

When the organisations in charge of our futures are sending more pages of paper than the dollars in our accounts, they’ve missed a major market trend.

It makes you wonder what else they are getting wrong.

Monash’s Textbook Behaviour

University is expensive.

News flash: annual fees for a Bachelor of Marketing are $8,300. That’s over a $1,000 per unit. Which means you pay almost $350 a week for your education.

I think my figures are on the money, well after paying so much to take statistics (twice) you’d hope so.

But who cares? It all goes on HECS anyway. Our generation is so trigger happy with the concept of credit. We know debt is bad but that’s for our future high-paid and better dressed selves to deal with. Right?

Unfortunately this article does not hold any magical keys to unlocking yourself from HECS debt. Though there are the classics of:

- Travel overseas for a few years, return home and get yourself a new tax-file number.

Or

- Never earn over $41,500 a year.

Your long-term university debts are what they are. However every year students are consistently wasting around a thousand dollars…on textbooks. Book prices may vary unit to unit, but lets face it they’re not cheap.

But surely you must buy the prescribed textbook at the campus bookstore, right? Wrong. But it says ‘must have’ in my unit outline….

One of the most symbolic and clichéd images of university is the Library. Libraries are filled with books! Well, somebody had to be ‘Captain Obvious’. Currently, ‘prescribed textbooks’ are sitting on shelves collecting dust.

There are a limited number of copies, but the number of students borrowing them seems to be even more limited. Also why do students have blinkers on when it comes to textbooks? There is more than one book on, say ‘Buyer Behaviour’ than the one prescribed in your unit outline. These aren’t novels with unique stories; they’re well studied and published subject matters. Different doesn’t mean they’re pirated from Thailand where some have pages are missing or written in a different language. Exam questions don’t come from one a specific author/textbook and neither does an education.

Yet students insist on trading hundreds of dollars for prescribed texts. A select few have some initiative and buy and sell second hand. An army of people before you have taken the same subjects; do you think they all want to keep their textbooks? Sure sometimes you’re supposed to have a newer edition. But publishers bring out new editions of textbooks more regularly than Michael Jackson’s changed his face (rest his soul).

Here’s a secret, a new edition generally means; a new cover, a few different photos, and slightly varied layout. That’s the difference in paying full price at the bookstore and buying one off a fellow student for 50% less. . Though I must say that ‘Monash Market Place’ looks like something out of the Windows DOS era.

First years don’t even know where the books in the lirary are. Let alone where to buy second hand copies. They’re too busy undertaking units like BBEG101: Beer Bong Engineering and PCD125: Introduction to Pub Crawling Dynamics. That’s fair enough, but by second year students should know better.

Monash is supposedly harbouring the future top guns of the marketing industry.

We’re supposed to be the best. The kind of graduates that can sell a cat to a mouse and then get it to come back for the tiger upgrade in 6 months on a loyalty program.

Hundreds of students buy the same textbook each semester. Nobody’s considered that if we all bought them together (straight from the Publisher) of the savings we’d make. Logistical nightmare: maybe. Bulk Buying discount: priceless.

Lets Just Say That

There’s nothing Top Gun about our textbook buying behaviour, though the word ‘Goose’ does come to mind.