By browsing around on ADWEEK for any interesting articles, I found one that’s particularly interesting. With the recent launch (March 12, 2013) of Blizzard Entertainment’s “Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm” game, PETA took this opportunity to raise awareness.

For people who don’t know what “Starcraft II” is, it is a science fiction real time strategy game developed by Blizzard Entertainment where the gameplay revolves around the player building an army by mining resources to overwhelm his opponent in online multiplayer battles. This game also includes a single player story mode. Essentially, there are three factions you can play with: Terran (humans), Protoss (humanoid-like alien race with advanced technology), and Zerg (beast-like insectoid aliens).

Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm is the second addition to the Starcraft II trilogy, with this one focusing on the Zerg (first one was focused on the Terran). Since the Zerg are biological like creatures and the main antagonists in the Starcraft universe, PETA invaded the launch day by handing out anti-abuse pamphlets to urge gamers to respect the game’s “pixellated extraterrestrials.” Of course, this campaign by PETA was nothing more than a parody, but I do think it was successful (whether or not PETA wanted it to be).

Because of this “parody” done by PETA, I thought that it was effective in raising some form of awareness among the gamers. Because some were angry about PETA, word of mouth about PETA’s campaign will probably go around and will start spreading to more and more people. In a way, I suppose it was effective in getting the gaming community’s attention.

This campaign’s goal was to remind us that while “while Zerglings are not real, there are many equally “strange” and exotic animals we share this planet with who deserve our empathy.” I believe there is some truth to that goal as we humans are not the only ones on this planet, we share this planet with other organisms and that we shouldn’t “discriminate” against them just because they look “strange” to us.

I recently found an article that was posted on February 18, 2013 that was related to what we have been learning in class last week – pricing strategy!

This article is about Best Buy “killing showrooming” for good and will now price match against local retail competitors along with 19 online major competitors (such as Amazon, Apple, Newegg, Target, etc). I believe Best Buy’s strategy relates to competitor orientation as Best Buy will now price match against its competitors prices. For instance, say Amazon sells something for $200 and Best Buy sells its for $300, Best Buy will match Amazon’s price to you in hopes of you buying it from Best Buy instead of buying it from from Amazon.

I think this is a great idea for Best Buy, as it gets consumers to consider Best Buy as an alternative place to buy products from. Lets assume that there’s a product that the consumer wants on Amazon is priced at $100, but shipping is $50 (I’m exaggerating the price), and Best Buy has it at $200, AND the consumer lives close to a Best Buy (lets say a 10 minute drive), it’ll be worth going to Best Buy, have it price match against Amazon, and then buy it from Best Buy. It’s a win-win situation for both the consumer and Best Buy: consumer gets the item he/she wants (immediate gratification), Best Buy gains the revenue/profit from the transaction.

However, from my previous experience with Best Buy, I think it needs its employees to work on their customer services as I find them sometimes unwilling to help you find the item you are looking for or are just not very helpful at all. If this happens to other consumers, it just might put them off and leave Best Buy.

Also, I know Best Buy tends to charge their items very high relative to other stores, such as Newegg. So in the future, I really hope they’re pricing reasonably. If they’re charging something for $80 and I can get it somewhere else for half the price, they just might lose a potential customer.

“Introducing Graph Search”

This new upcoming feature from Facebook is currently in beta, but its functions and capabilities are already listed out to the public. You can join in on the wait list if you really want to have early access to it, or if you live in the USA, you are already in the beta program.

Anyways, about the Graph Search. In my opinion, its really a more advanced way of searching for people, place, and things. For instance, you can search up friends or people who live in a certain place, such as Los Angeles, New York, etc. You can even search friends who might have similar interests as you such as friends who like basketball, gaming, running, etc. Basically, it helps you search people who fit the criteria you want on Facebook. Of course, people get paranoid about privacy on Facebook, so there are ways you can set what can be searched, so there’s no need to worry about being exposed to the public.

In my opinion, I think this can really benefit companies by taking advantage of this new feature. This is because I believe Facebook is already a giant database full of people’s profile. With the Graph Search, I think it’ll just enhance Facebook’s database and make it easier for companies to do some market research since there will be richer consumer data for companies to analyze. Also, the Graph Search connects people of similar interests as Facebook users can connect people who have the same interests. This already helps companies a lot because as long as they have a big presence on Facebook, whenever a Facebook user “likes” their business page, they can just see what kind of people are under certain groups and see what they’re interested in, where they work, etc. This can really fortify companies’ understanding of their consumers in distinct Facebook groups with people of different interests. Although these groups already exist, the Graph Search will just make things a lot easier to find and locate on Facebook. Basically, it’ll be more efficient and less time consuming to do searches on Facebook.

However, I could be wrong with my assumptions as the Graph Search is still in beta, who knows what add-ons or changes Facebook might add before it’s available for everyone to use!