Chapter 13

I feel as though I need to get something off of my chest from the get-go. Personally, I do not understand why the book has Chapter 13 placed so far in the back of the book when it just goes into more detail about Chapter 1. It goes further in explaining the relationship that marketing, advertising, and public relations have, as well as focusing more on the marketing aspect of public relations. The book makes reference to the four P’s known as the marketing mix and those P’s are: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. The first example of marketing involving great use of those P’s would be the marketing of the new Playstation 3. The Playstation 3 (or PS3) was the third generation of Playstation gaming systems from Sony. When the Playstation 3 first came out, it had to compete with the XBOX 360 and in many areas, the two systems were completely similar but rather than give up on trying to get an edge over their rival, Sony decided to retool their PRODUCT by changing the packaging from a bulky, computer system to a sleek, slim, more compact model. As soon as the word got out via news releases, social networks and blogs, the PS3 slim was all that people could talk about. Then when it was reported that the PRICE was going to be cut at all the PLACES that sell the system even though Sony was adding more memory to it; decision on the price forced XBOX into making a decision on their systems’ prices as well. The PROMOTION of it was also interesting because their commercial has a line that I hear many people quote now from that commercial which means a lot of people watched it and paid attention to it. Here is the commercial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyVhP46xCQw (and just for the record, the released version is the censored version, Sony received some bad publicity from their comments in what was dubbed as the uncensored version.

In conclusion, Sony did a great job of marketing the new PS3 at a time that caught their competitors’ off-guard. They precisely executed all four of the P’s in their marketing (even if they did have a slight hiccough in the commercial aspect)