For this blog post I chose to do a little research on DeMarini which is a subsidiary of Wilson Sporting Goods Co. The brand is most popular for selling metal bats that are used by players of all ages. As a baseball player I have used both parts of these brands for as long as I can remember. Never having any problems with them, I thought this would give me a good chance to look at their social media to see what others have to say about it. As I came to Linn-Benton to play baseball, we only use wood bats so I haven't been able to use a metal DeMarini bat in a couple years. As time has gone on without using this brand of bat, I thought that consumers would have different views than some may of had in the past. The other cool thing about this brand that made me want to learn about it more was that it was founded in Oregon in 1989.
As I have accounts on all major social media platforms I began to look through each one and found that DeMarini is only really big at posting on instagram. After going through most of the posts it shocked me that each post had very similar feedback from consumers. With DeMarini selling the most popular metal bats of this generation most people would be okay with a little restock delay but it seems that it's a way bigger problem than it should be. The number one thing that people were spitting out was to restock their favorite model of bat. Each and every post had at least one person talk about how they want them restocked and that they are tired of waiting.
There tends to be a trend with baseball players and their gear and how they treat their bats, gloves, etc. like their own kid. This goes out to show why some comment about the looks and use some form of emoji to express how they feel about that specific piece of equipment.
Then the most painful comments in my opinion are they ones that are explaining how their bats are breaking. People are obviously going to get mad about spending a good amount of money on things that could potentially break but that happens in all sports. There is a low number of products in the market that are meant to last a lifetime and I believe that DeMarini does a good enough job of putting out there that they these products aren't like those one of a kind products. They always guarantee a 1-year warranty that will cover broken products.
The most negative thing that I took away from reading a lot of these comments is that DeMarini doesn't comment back. I believe that they should in fact comment back to some of the people who express their opinions on the brand. One of the reasons for that is because a lot of the users who comment are part of the youth community that absolutely love hearing back from their favorite brands. I come across other brands who even just comment back "Thank you" showing that they are thankful for all of the support. That is the bare minimum I would expect from a brand like this. With all of that being said I still do believe that what DeMarini is doing is top level. Their "WHY" attracts so many families and individuals who believe in them and they seem to do a great job to express their thanks in some sort of way. They are here to make a dedication to top performance, which is important to all youth playing this sport. And that answers the value proposition portion of this post. They believe that other than having fun, top performance is key and they do all they can each year to provide models that perform better than the year before. They also like to share what their consumers are doing with their products on the media. I think that this is the biggest way they show thanks to people who use their brand.
Every brand has their unique way of marketing their products and I found that one of the biggest ways DeMarini markets their products on social media is through other high levels teams that are sponsored by them. I don't think they have much of a story telling background but what they do is use a lot of top division one baseball programs to show off their new products. Every kids baseball dream to play division one baseball and eventually play in the big leagues. The way they use teams like Vanderbilt, Oregon State, Florida, Arizona State, and other popular programs to promote their products definitely sends a message to the youth seeing it. And I believe that message gets out to the youth as "you use our product you can be like them" which gets them every time.
Before starting this term in marketing, I never really looked at the comments about brands. Once this was issued as an assignment I would look at pages and just scroll through comments when I was bored. I learned that no matter how successful a company/brand is, there are always flaws that are easily visible to the public.
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