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.

On The Ball?

Five minutes after the opening bounce, my girlfriend asks me: “what’s the company logo printed on the ball?” Well, an hour and a half, three cataracts and two headaches later we’re both still stumped.

Fans scream ‘ball’ and abuse at the umpires, but the little voice in my head has profanity only for the cameraman to zoom in on the football! Nothing else matters.

Roo lines up 50m out, dead in front. The camera zooms in… I can see the enlarged ball, but Roo’s sausage fingers are covering the printed logo! By the end of the game my neck resembles that of a baby giraffe’s and the advertiser on the ball has escaped me, but it’s about the only form of advertising in AFL that has.

Advertising in sport is everywhere. If you have the money, your company name, logo or slogan can be placed just about anywhere.

Some Australian sports, like basketball and rugby are a stone’s throw away from advertisements being tattooed onto players’ skin or shaved into their heads! AFL is yet to fall so far. Footy jumpers only have one or two sponsors, unlike the marketing patchwork quilts that other codes have to pull on every weekend.

Football supporters now have to get their heads (and wallets) around the fact that their treasured game of AFL is now a business. That’s the bottom line. From jumpers, television ads, trading cards, official food and drink, stadium signage to pixel space on club websites: the AFL is a smorgasbord of opportunity for marketing exploits.

Advertising has married into the sport: ‘for better or worse…til death do us part’.

Advertising is directed at the fans, but it also affects players, largely through lucrative endorsements deals. Though somewhat more gratifyingly last year when Barry Hall broke his wrist on a QBE Insurance boundary board…now that’s impact advertising!

Karma and advertising united in one satisfying crunch.

However advertising in sport is sometimes purely irritating.

Take the ‘TripleM Rocks Football’ radio broadcast for example; great commentary team, but there’s one problem: its in-game promotion. If I hear the scoreboard called the ‘TripleM, Foxtel scoreboard’ or mistake the number of Chris Judd’s disposals for how many Carlton Draught beers he’s had, I’m going to shoot someone. Brayshaw, Taylor and the rest have to keep up with the sponsors as much as the game itself.
It’s like drinking orange juice after brushing your teeth.
It’s absurd.

My jury’s out on advertising in Footy. On the one hand it brings money to the game that will (or should) be put back into it. While on the other, it has the potential to smother the game.

Lets Just Say That
Advertising in AFL must be checked not just chequed in the future.

Why Netball Is Boring

A team’s aim, in any sport, is to win – to beat its opponents. This is achieved by scoring more points than its opponent before time runs out. Both sides fight for the better score.

It is this aspect of netball that lets itself down, not only as a sport, but also as a source of entertainment – its scoring. Its goal mouth action (or lack of) is to say the least… dull. Once the ‘goal attack’ or ‘goal shooter’ has the ball inside that semi-circle; its game over. The G.A or G.S has ample time to focus on the unguarded net and shoot from a distance that is often laughable. As for the defence they have to keep one metre away and intimidation of any kind is classed as ‘obstruction’ which results in an even more ‘free’ shot. Some last line of defence. When defending a shot, the defensive player is about as useful as a kerosene heater in the Sahara.

Shooting in netball is akin to basketball’s ‘foul shot’: ‘an unobstructed shot given to penalize the other team for committing a foul’. These shots are expected by the fans, the coach, the team and especially the player to be converted into points (every time). Sure, there is some pressure. Yet they are unhindered shots, and are so dubbed ‘charity shots’. Every shot in netball is a ‘charity shot’. At least in basketball the players shoot from fifteen feet away, not three.

Never experienced déjà vu before? Then watch a netball game. Every ‘basket’ is exactly the same. Imagine a highlight reel of netball shots. I shudder to think. All you’d have to do is record one and then put it on a loop. Nobody would know the difference. You don’t watch a netball game to see points scored.

Author Tim O’Brien once wrote “the mystery is all”. This very much applies to sport- you don’t want to know what happens next. That’s what’s exciting – the unknown. Yet from the moment a netball shooter is preparing for her shot, you the sports fan have already added that unscored point to your team’s total. And why shouldn’t you, she shouldn’t really miss should she….

Lets Just Say That:

For a sport that used to be called Women’s Basketball its not getting any more fans than women who play it themselves.

Where’s The Marketing in Monash Marketing?

Rule Number 1 in Marketing: know your consumers. Remember, without the consumer there is no product.

The Business and Economics faculty at University is usually perceived as dull and mind-numbingly boring. Well, with subjects like taxation law and advanced accounting who could argue differently? Even our future lawyers and accountants are often found asleep in lectures (that’s if they even bothered showing up at all). Yet the business faculty has always held an ‘ace up its sleeve’…
Marketing.

Ah, Marketing. The BusEco diamond in the rough. Or so we young, play-doh like high-school graduates were led to believe. Marketing fulfils a need, and being another sheep in society’s education process I thought Monash Marketing would fulfil my need for an interesting and worthwhile degree. Yet after my first semester I soon discovered the Marketing Department had lost sight of its own teachers.

In lectures we are constantly being told that marketing in the real world is ‘constantly evolving’. If you don’t keep up with change; you fall over, fall behind and get trampled by a stampede of competitors. This advice is always well received, especially when all the lecture slides have 1996 printed in the bottom left-hand corner.

If any department’s teaching staff should know how to make their subject material interesting and appealing it should be Marketing. The Quintessence of Marketing is to ‘Satisfy the Consumer’. Yet when the student is trying harder to understand the Lecturer/Tutor’s heavily accented ‘English’ rather than the content material, let’s just say the odds aren’t looking good. * Sidenote- ‘just because you know something doesn’t mean you have the ability to teach it’.

Lecture theatres are equipped with state of the art projectors, blue-ray DVD players and crystal clear surround sound systems. The ingredients are there for an amazing learning experience every week. But when a lecturer comes in with a 1980’s VHS and takes 15 minutes to figure out how to turn the sound on, the will to live let alone learn is almost gone. Imagine if Gordon Ramsay were an academic and not a chef. He could have hit TV shows like ‘Lecture Nightmares’ or ‘Hells Lectures’. He’d F-bomb the fuck out of the teaching staff to get some initiative.

A University students’ consumer lifestyle profile in a nutshell looks a little like this:
- Like to drink lots of alcohol
- Like to stay up/out late
- Usually party on Thursday night
- Like to gamble

So naturally the Marketing Department concludes upon this:
- 8:30am lectures on Fridays
- A brand management exam that starts at the same time as the nation’s public holiday Melbourne Cup Race. (this is despite petitions against for the past 100 years)

My mother tells me I should suck it up and ‘grow a pair’. That it’s not the University’s prerogative to ‘make me happy’.
Being the good ‘Gen Y’ son I am.
I disagree.
University is not just a one way street. Monash University has an investment in the students as much as they have an investment in the University.

Monash Marketing’s reputation, scratch that; brand equity, is tied up in their graduates. They ignore their harsh reality of slumping performance because the internet has picked up a lot of the slack. I honestly believe you could go your entire Marketing studies at Monash without buying or borrowing a prescribed text-book (which is the same text as 5 years ago it just now says 7th edition). The internet is the mother of all silver spoons. It has everything you need to know about marketing hidden in its digital bosom.

Yet what should Monash be afraid of. Are they giving an inferior product than say RMIT or Deakin? Who knows? Few students are brand switchers when it comes to their University. So they’re not losing many current students to other brands. And you can rest assured that come Open Days Monash Marketing will finally make some effort. They’ll have a slightly altered song and dance performed by one of the few good lecturers they do have. So they guarantee new students. So what has Monash Marketing actually lost? They’re numbers are probably better than ever.
They’ve lost integrity.
They’ve lost Credibility.
They’ve lost the interest of their students.

Let’s Just Say That:
Monash Marketing is in need of a little re-branding.