Big Oil, Boeing, and Billionaires.

Marketing and Business in the World

Introduction

    Hello! I am Matt Sigale, a marketing and management double major here at Bradley University. I hope to working in the corporate marketing industry ideally in-house for a company. I try my best to stay up to date with current events relating to business and marketing as I find it very interesting. You do not need to read every story but I try to pick ones that are interesting. 

Big Oil's Conundrum.

    Some big marketing news this past week comes from the Big Oil companies. Shell and Chevron have realized a problem for them and it comes from lack of positive branding. This is especially big in younger generations where the environmental consciousness is at it's highest. The oil companies have realized that this is a problem and have started focusing their marketing campaigns towards Generation Z. In doing so they have taken to the wild west of social media, TikTok! Massive oil companies are unleashing social media campaigns with the overall goal of gaining some goodwill with the younger generations. 

    This starts with Shell's campaign with Sage Erickson, an American surfer who is known for their pro-environment campaigns and generally being very green. This was an big shock for Erickson's fans as Shell is obviously not known for their environmental-friendliness. However, this clearly did not have the reach or message that Shell was intending it did not change anyone's view on Shell's involvement in the climate crisis. This campaign had a lot of ground to make-up as Shell is one of the largest fossil fuel companies which is usually the first thing on peoples' mind when the company is brought up. Shell has also been attempting to go further on the marketing offence by creating a Fortnite racing game based around their brand and product. That's right, the smash hit video game with a demographic mainly consisting of people who are not even old enough to drive yet, is one of the primary placements for Shell's marketing. 

    Chevron has also been attempting to turn their dollars into positive opinions of them with their campaign targeting the younger generations. They had a large booth at one of the largest gaming conventions, TwitchCon. This booth gave out merchandise, hosted games, and consisted of other experiential marketing. They then followed BP's foray into TikTok with a rap challenge to win some prizes. Chevron's approach is slightly more interesting as they're attempting to garner engagement with prizes and rewards for participants which you don't see all the time.

    Overall, it is not yet known how these campaigns will perform as they are currently happening. However, it does not really matter does it? No one is buying one oil company's product over another's because they don't agree with what the brand believes in. They are buying gas at Shell over BP because they need to fill up their car and one is more convenient or offers a cheaper prices, not because of a TikTok. It will be interesting to see how these campaigns play out and I am curious to see their marketing going forward as their overall problem is not going away.

Talk about a flight risk!

    Boeing has had a terrible time recently as their product was proven to not be fully 100% safe. During a routine commercial flight with over a hundred passengers on it, the door of a Boeing 737 flight flew off causing depressurization and the plane obviously had to be grounded. A huge coincidence also happened on that flight, the two people who were meant to sit in the seats in front of that door who would have been at huge risk of injury, actually missed their flight. Talk about a lucky break!

    This problem was further exacerbated when safety inspections of other Boeing planes found more problems with the engineering. Now despite any number of potential reasons for this oversight, there is one critical change in their operations that happened. There used to be a system where, for the first test flight, the engineers that worked on the plane would actually be in attendance. This caused the engineers to ensure that everything related to safety and quality was up to par as they had literal skin in the game. There was even an instance where they were able to fix a problem in the plane in the middle of the test flight. However, this process was outsourced to eastern Asia and since then the quality assurance has gone slightly downhill.

    While these problems are one in a million and the door of your passenger plane will most likely not pop out, there should be no reason to have any margin of error when it comes to customer safety. This revelation about their planes has sent their customers and stock into a frenzy. Since the door incident, their stock has dropped 30 to 50 dollars depending on the day and it is reasonable to assume they will initiate a safety campaign to build some customer trust again.

 

Billionaire's hobbies.

    Our favorite tech mogul Mark Zuckerberg has taken to social media to announce his new hobby. Raising cattle? That's right, Mark Zuckerberg has turned his 1,400 acre space in Hawaii into a compound for raising his own herd of cattle in which he aims to create a form of beef that is better than A5 wagyu beef. A5 wagyu beef is already considered the best beef on the planet and comes in at a current market rate of 134.99 per pound of the raw beef. How does Mark plan on creating this new super beef? Macadamia nuts. He plans to feed his herd a primary diet of macadamia nuts and beer that is made on-site of the ranch. In an era of unprecedented wealth inequality, billions of people worldwide starving, and roughly 40 million Americans below the poverty line, Mark Zuckerberg goes on social media to brag about his new "better than wagyu" cattle living off of macadamia nuts. It is no surprise that he is under heavy criticism with Mitch Jones, policy director at Food & Water Watch, a national legal and policy nonprofit saying "Raising cattle on water-intensive macadamia nuts and beer is just a billionaire’s strange sideshow. We need real agriculture reform to address the inequities in our food system and the reality of a warming climate." It will be interesting to see how this plays out if macadamia nuts are really just the secret diet that all ranchers have been missing the entire time.

    The Wall Street Journal has published an article about Elon Musk. Apparently, some executives and board members fear the billionaire’s use of drugs. The drugs mentioned are not the typical recreational use drugs that we've seen the tech billionaire use before on shows like the Joe Rogan podcast. These are claims that he regularly uses illicit substances such as LSD, cocaine, ecstasy, mushrooms, and even ketamine. Supposedly it has been a kind of "open secret" where no one wanted to mention it. However, it seems his recent escapade into the social media industry has got his executives and board members spooked. These businesspeople would seemingly have a lot of their compensation tied up in stock of the companies they run and feel that Elon Musk's habits could potentially get in the way of his company's profit. This is further amplified with the lack of revenue for X (Formally Twitter) which could lead to Elon having to turn to his Tesla shares for avenues of repayment for the massive 44 billion dollar loan he took out to takeover the platform.

Conclusion.

    Overall, those were the most interesting stories that found in recent news as I want to try to keep them short and only mention the stories that would be most relevant to our day to day lives.

Week 1