A Marketing View

After watching the two-part Al Jazeera investigation How to sell a massacre on ABC, something interesting dawned on me… It followed One Nation Chief of Staff James Ashby and its Queensland senate leader Steve Dickson on a trip to the USA, visiting pro-gun groups/activists like the National Rifle Association (NRA), to strike up relationships that could potentially result in donations received to the party. All of this being secretly filmed by Rodger Muller (hired by Al Jazeera), posing as a front for a fake gun lobbying group ‘Gun Rights Australia’. The aim: water-down the National Firearms Agreement (1996) , an agreement put in motion after the Port Arthur Massacre of 1996. Whilst meeting with the NRA about a third through the program, they were discussing how they respond to gun-related incidents. A strategy that they implement to combat this is to “exploit people’s anger and fear” by posting little videos on YouTube. This results in more people buying guns, becaus...

With the Formula 1 Australian Grand prix coming up this week in Melbourne, I thought for my first blog entry I would start off by talking about F1’s use of social media over the last few years. (I’m an avid F1 fan, particularly of Ferrari) To provide some context, in 2017 the owners of the sport changed hands to Liberty Media from previous owner Bernie Ecclestone (some of you may know Tamara Ecclestone, this is her father). F1’s lack of activeness on social media usage before the changeover was very notable; no race highlights, interviews or special features were available on its social media platforms. Rather, fans had to pay a subscription on the official Formula 1 website to access that sort of content. Fans were howling for this content to be made available on social media. One of the five points of being social in The challenges and opportunities of social media (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010), is to be active. This entails businesses to take the lead and create relationships ...