Brenton Chin's Blog

Hi, my name is Brenton Chin and I’m sure like everybody in this course , I’m taking it because it is one of the required courses in 2nd year. I’m planning to pick Marketing as my major because I like being creative. After taking the two accounting classes, calculus and COMM 290, I think I’d rather stay away from numbers and focus on studying things that are not so black and white.

My experience with marketing so far is mostly limited to being a consumer… and as I’m sure you’ve guessed, like everyone I’ve been subjected to many commercials – whether it be on TV,radio, YouTube… etc… In terms of my favorite ad, I like the ones that have catchy jingles that stick in your head. Off the top of my head I can remember one that I ALWAYS hear on the radio “call 1-800-267-2001…. alaaarrrm force!”  I think its pretty clever for the marketers to incorporate the company’s phone number into the jingle. You’d think it wouldn’t work, but here I am, able to sing all nine digits of the phone number off of the top of my head – the fact that I can sing this jingle without even thinking while barely being able to remember my grandparents number shows how powerful this jingle is for the company! Ads that I don’t like are the political ones where parties try to state all the negative attributes about the opposing political candidate… I guess it’s because its so depressing. Also, I dislike radio ads that use car honks as sound effects. There have been so many incidents where I have been driving and have gotten startled from hearing a loud car honk protruding from my car’s speakers. I know that the advertisers are desperately trying to get our attention, but they need to think about safety!

Here’s the video of the Alarm Force jingle that I like… it comes near the end.

Anyways, to get more of a feel of who I am, I thought I’d post some pictures of some brands that I like/admire:

Anyways, an interesting thing about me is that I am Chinese but sadly I don’t speak the language.. which is unfortunate, because my grandparents only speak Chinese so its really difficult to communicate with them using only hand signals. This is why I’m really enthusiastic about taking beginner level Chinese courses at UBC so that I will be able to communicate with them one day.