Filtering by
- Member of: Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
- Resource Type: Text
- Status: Published
Since 1930—with the exception of the break for World War II—every four years, the world’s best national teams face off in a soccer tournament. The last two tournaments hosted by South Africa in 2010 and Brazil in 2014 will be the emphasis of this paper. Each tournament featured the thirty-two countries and captured a television audience of over three billion people throughout the month-long tournament, one billion of which tuned in for the final. For comparison, the Super Bowl XLIX where the New England Patriots defeated the Seattle Seahawks 28 to 24 was the most watched event in United States’ history with a viewership of 114.4 million people.
Countries spend years planning and preparing to win a bid to host one of these mega events. Bids are often times awarded eight to twelve years in advance. There has been a recent trend of developing countries hosting the FIFA World Cups and the future bids already awarded follow that trend. Many people ask the question of whether all the money spent on infrastructure, construction, and tourism to host this tournament and gain international exposure are really worth it? Simply put, the 2010 FIFA World Cup was valuable to South Africa while the 2014 FIFA World Cup was not worth the costs to Brazil.
Especially during the current COVID-19 pandemic and age of social unrest in the United States, there has been an increasing need for comfort, yet the idea of comfort is quite vague and rarely elaborated upon. To simplify the idea of comfort and communicate the ideas around it effectively, I am defining comfort as a subset of escapism in which a person escapes to reduce or alleviate feelings of grief or distress. As companies rush to comfort their customers in this current state of uncertainty, marketers are pressed to identify people’s insecurities and comfort them without coming off as insensitive or trite. Current comfort marketing focuses on inspiring nostalgia in its customers, having them recall previous positive experiences or feelings to comfort them. Nostalgic marketing techniques may ease mild grief in some cases, but using them to alleviate severe distress probably will not be as effective, and has contributed to several seemingly out-of-touch “COVID-19 era” commercials.<br/>When addressing comfort, marketers should understand the type and hierarchy of comfort that they are catering to. Not all comforts are equal, in that some comforts make us feel better than others and some do not comfort us at all. A better understanding of how and why comforts change among different individuals, and possibly being able to predict the comfort preference based on a product or service, will help marketers market their goods and services more effectively. By diversifying and specializing comfort marketing using this hierarchical method, marketers will be able to more significantly reach their customers during “uncertain times.”
As the COVID-19 pandemic took the world by storm, the hotel industry struggled to remain afloat. Many resorted to innovative solutions to maintain their business and jobs. As the hotel industry grappled with ideas that could keep their business afloat, an idea called EasyHub was born. EasyHub is a hypothetical mobile device application that bridges the user and a paired SMART device or an entire ecosystem of SMART devices. While the design for EasyHub was initially intended to help hotels increase their accessibility, it soon became apparent that EasyHub could potentially be a product of much greater market value. As the idea of EasyHub became more developed, the COVID-19 pandemic was beginning to subdue, and the hotel industry was on the mend. Assuming that EasyHub is found useful, it could theoretically boost demand to businesses that use them. Many hotels already utilize SMART devices to some degree making them prime targets for EasyHub. This research paper seeks to determine if EasyHub can aid hotels’ recovery from the pandemic-induced recession by increasing revenue. Surveys were conducted among hoteliers and a general audience to determine the impact of EasyHub on guests’ decisions to stay at a hotel. The results indicate that EasyHub would not be a significant factor in guests’ decision-making of hotels; however, this may be due to a lack of clarity about the product, as many respondents expressed a desire for more information. Further development and testing of EasyHub is necessary before a market analysis and its full potential can be assessed.