Week 4 EOC: Advertising is based on happiness

Happiness

A time that I bought something and was really happy with it and continue to be happy with it was when I bought my Playstation 3. It has been three years now since I have bought this video game system and to this day I am still happy with it. Although it was very expensive ($600) I knew that it was an expensive buy, but the main reason why I had to have it, other than the fact that it was Sony’s brand new video game system, was the fact that the system was backwards compatible. Backwards compatible meaning that I was going to be able to play my Playstation 1 and Playstation 2 games on it. Unfortunately for the people that have the new Playstation 3’s, they are not backwards compatible, but for some reason, to me being a dedicated gamer, I had to have that backwards compatibleness and Sony has made me very happy with this purchase.

Dissonance

A time when I bought something (and still paying off) was when I bought my brand new (at the time) Saturn Astra. At first I didn’t want to trade in my current car which was a Saturn Ion, I was very happy with it, but I had to get rid of it because it was starting to give me some problems and the car had over 86,000 miles on it. So I got myself a brand new Saturn Astra, still on the model floor and had only 11 miles on the odometer. Now two years later I still have the car, it is very reliable, but to this day I still wish I had my Saturn Ion because that car really brought me happiness. The Saturn Astra still brings me happiness because it gets me to where I need and want to go, but the Saturn Ion just made me happier than the Astra.

Week 3 EOC: Internet Privacy vs Market Research

The internet and privacy are two completely different things and are, sometimes, impossible to have at the same time. When someone signs up for a new account anywhere, they have to give some kind of information about themselves. Whether it would be their address, their age or even their name, once its put on the internet anybody and everybody have a chance to see it.

“Market researchers, service departments and marketing departments often analyze comments made on the Internet to understand consumer attitudes and satisfaction with products and services. Researchers want to understand what people think; service departments want to follow up to improve satisfaction; marketing departments may want to make you aware of competing products. “

http://blog.vovici.com/blog/bid/28663/Consumer-Attitudes-towards-Social-Media-Market-Research-casrotech

You would think that law enforcement and/or the government would be following and monitoring more than anyone else but the result is not them.

“The United States Supreme Court has stated that American citizens have the protection of the Fourth Amendment (freedom from search and seizure absent warrant) when there is a reasonable expectation of privacy.  Without a reasonable expectation of privacy, however, there is no privacy right to protect.  Files stored on disk or tapes in the home are protected, but the rule becomes less clear when applied to files stored on an Internet access provider's server.  Web servers, on the other hand, may be protected by federal law.  Some argue that consent of the access provider, however, is all that is required for law enforcement authorities to search and seize any files in the possession of that access provider. Internet service providers may have a lot of information about the users because servers routinely record information about users' e-mail and web browsing habits.”

http://www.netatty.com/privacy/privacy.html

So as a final thought, internet privacy is something that does not exist, if you are on the internet, there is no privacy!

“The lack of privacy is a government created problem – they are the ones doing the surveillance or mandating that ISP's log everything you do. They are the ones who are forming alliances with big businesses and who, through non-free-market privileges, monopolies, and a central bank money-lending system, create the atmosphere for unusually large mega corporations to exist.”

http://www.lewrockwell.com/green-p/green-p10.1.html

Week 3 EOC: Making money for good

Antonelli College is an Ohio-based for-profit school with campuses in Jackson and Hattiesburg. It helps many students that dont have the money to go to college. This oranization has its pros and cons. Some other college universities have different thoughts on this.

"This is going to derail a ton of people," said Milton Anderson, president of Virginia College's Jackson campus. "It's going to be a major problem."

http://www.clarionledger.com/article/20101019/NEWS/10190349/New-rules-may-hurt-for-profit-colleges

The for-profit has gotten big over the past decade and are continuesly bringing in lower-income students and minorities. Antonelli, with about 300 students on its Jackson campus, has a 70 percent minority enrollment and 85 percent who qualify for the Pell Grant. About 97 percent have federal loans.

I think that having a for-profit university in colleges, it is a good thing and a bad thing at the same time. People that work hard for their education go through a lot to go to college and when they see that some of the students there are getting their education for free (almost) they feel that they are going to be “cheated” out of their education.  But it will pay out all in the end. Because the better a person gets, the better a job that person is going to get and with that said, a better paying job, the more taxes that that person will have to pay, so in the long run, somebody is going to get their money back one way or another.

Week 2 EOC: Boston Consulting Group - Video Games

In the video game industry the PS3 is the star in my opinion, if you look at the chart below, you can clearly see that the market of the PS3 it is just growing and growing. They have a great product and a great trail of followers, their reputation is also just getting bigger and better. Granted their system is expensive, thats one of the reasons why that they are not the cash cow.

"Pidgeon suggested that by 2012, the PS3 will lead the pack, with more than 107 million units sold worldwide, while the Wii will be just behind, at nearly 107 million units."

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-9948454-52.html#ixzz12Iq5p5zp

The cash cow as of now is most defiantly the Nintendo Wii. The wii has done great in sales and is the leader of the pack when it comes to sales simply for the fact that this system is the cheapest out of all three of the major systems. I think that the reason of this impact, that the reason the wii has done so well not just for the price that it is, but also for the fact that the country is in a recession and people don't have the money to get a PS3 or an X-Box 360, because of this recession, people are only going to buy what they can afford and I think now that the country is starting to come out of the recession, people are beginning to afford and PS3 or an Xbox.

"The sales are slowing at a faster rate than analysts had forecast. A drop of 13 percent last fiscal year followed an 18 percent drop the year before, indicate that there is a bigger problem than simple oversaturation of the market. With Sony and Microsoft still selling units at a steady pace (and the PS3 actually increasing in sales), Nintendo is slowly losing ground. It still has a huge lead of roughly a 30 million units, but that number is shrinking."
http://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/hardware-gaming/nintendo-wii-sales-begin-to-flatline/

The dog in the marketing industry is the Xbox 360, Microsoft does not come out with a good product when it comes to video game systems. Many people have had problems with the 360 (red ring of doom) and because of this little drawback, Microsoft have been losing customers left and right, one of the reasons why the PS3 is the star right now.

The question mark is one thing that is boggling everyones minds, gamers and retailers alike. No one really knows who is going to have the next best thing. People are saying its going to be the next Playstation (PS4), their saying its going to be the next Xbox, no one really knows, but if I were to put money on it I would defiantly have to say the next Playstation. Sony has the reputation to back themselves up, they have the third-party gaming software companies to back them up and on top of that, Sony has and will always come out with a good product. My doubts are (and I think everyone else's too) how much will this new system cost? Is it REALLY going to better than the last product? Only time will tell.

"The next generation is going to be so powerful that playing a game is going to be the equivalent of playing a CGI movie today," predicts Yves Guillemot, chairman and CEO of the publisher.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/31331241/The_Next_Generation_of_Gaming_Consoles

Week 1 EOC, Excellent customer service

Eoc week 1, Excellent customer service

An excellent customer service that I had was with a record company called Germantrance.com, because I am a dj and I found this site and ordered some vinyl records and had gotten my vinyl within a week. I found this excellent customer service because I knew that these vinyl records were coming all the way from the UK and I thought to myself “wow, that is pretty fast” and at that time when I found that one of the records that I had ordered did not come in with the rest of them. I emailed them about the situation, a copy of my receipt and the vinyl record that I was missing. Within the next week I had received a package in the mail and it was the vinyl record that I was supposed to have gotten. The thing that really surprised me in the fact that it was excellent customer service was that the shipping did not cost me anything and they did not ask any questions or did they not ask for further proof that I did not have that record. That to me is excellent customer service. Ever since that experience, I have always and will continue to always buy from Germantrance.com“Marketing is managing profitable customer relationships. The twofold goal of marketing is to attract new customers by promising superior value and to keep and grow current customers by delivering satisfaction.” Marketing: An Introduction for Education Management Corporation, 10th Edition, page 3

Week 1 EOC My Voice

I am a Film maker. I have been interested in film ever since I was a child (around the age of five), ever since I saw my first film “The Terminator”. This school is perfect for my needs of becoming a film maker, the program Digital Film Editing and Video Production has taught me a lot about film and film production. I find that my strong points in video production are in the editing process. After doing a few edits I realized that I want to be a film editor. I learned that there is a whole lot more in making a film than just pointing the camera and shoot, that’s a big part of it, but not all of it. Pre-production, post-production and production. Pre-production is the most important. This school has taught me to basically be the “jack of all trades” in this industry. To not just be an editor, but to also be a cameraman, lighting, sound, script, etc. and I feel that my strong points are not only in the editing process in post-production, but also in the graphics department as well. I have done some amazing graphics in After Effects and find that that is only the beginning, there are so many things that I can create in After Effects and also combine them in my editing for a film.