Super Bowl Segmentation

With the Super Bowl being such a one-sided affair, it was the perfect game for examining the commercials. I enjoyed many more of the commercials this year than I have in the past. The sponsors of the game, as well as many other companies, did a great job of appealing to a target market.

You may disagree with me about this and say that everyone watches the Super bowl, but I think otherwise. Even though the commercials are great, people who are not football fans are not going to watch the games. There is evidence of this when you look further into what commercials were played and what the intent was of each commercial. When examining the commercials further I found that many companies definitely used marketing segmentation to reach a specific target market. Marketing segmentation is dividing the total market into different groups with similar product needs. This is done so that you can design a marketing mix and reach a specific target market. The groups of people targeted were obviously football fans, but also men and the older generations. When saying older generations, I am talking about the age group from 21 to 55. You cannot really pinpoint a certain age by just watching, but we know they were focusing on older people instead of younger.

While watching, I wrote down every commercial I could and what it advertised. In doing so I found that approximately 100% of the commercials were something that people aged 21 to 55 would buy. There were not any commercials seeking to catch the attention of children to buy toys or to watch there shows. The only thing I could see smaller children wanting to buy is maybe a Butterfingers candy bar. Everything else was obviously geared toward older people because these are the people who actually watch the game. For the segment I named football fans, I calculated that only about 36% of the commercials focused directly on football fans. When saying directly related to football fans I took into account something you may eat or drink while attending a game, or watching it from home. The 36% also included the network you may watch the game on, like NFL Network. Commercials that I labeled as geared toward football fans were also interesting because they were the ones that either used seductive women or cute animals to attract consumers to their products.  Approximately 50% of all the commercials were focused directly at men. This number included mainly things such as truck commercials, beer commercials, and movie commercials that men would be interested in. I thought Chevrolet did the best job at designing a commercial to sell their truck to the people watching.  Men obviously make up the majority of people watching the game. One survey from CNS news said that 67% of people watching the Super Bowl are men. So for Chevrolet, why not present their truck as tough and dependable? It is apparent that their truck is tough and dependable because they use a tough cowboy hauling around cattle to portray this image. This is a classic example of how Chevrolet has advertised their trucks.

I guess most of the information above we could call primary data since I collected it by myself. The target markets used by the companies to market their products were the right ones to use due to the fact that these are the people that watch the game. It was kind of interesting to discover that only 36% of commercials were geared directly toward football fans. This is the biggest game of the year for all football fans yet only 36% of the ads are directly related to them. If you just look at this number it seems kind of odd, but when looking at all the numbers it becomes easier to understand. Even though men and football fans are two separate segments, many aspects of the segments are very similar. Many men are also going to be football fans. Even though the advertisers did not advertise directly to football fans they did in fact advertise heavily to men. This makes sense when we say that 67% of people watching are men. For the other 33% of people watching, most would be under the first marketing segment of people ages 21 to 55. The marketing segments were brilliantly set up by most of the sponsors and other companies, reaching out to all the different people watching, to buy their products. For me this Super Bowl had the best commercials by far. All the commercials were fun, innovative and they made their products seem attractive to the eye. Without the great quality of advertisements the Super Bowl may not have had any viewers.