Description of the Company
Oakley is a sportswear’s company that has been founded in 1975 by James Jannard. It all started in the back of Mr Jannard’s garage when he started selling “motocross grip”. It then became a big worldwide company. This company’s headquarter is based in Foothill Ranch, California, United Stated. In 1983, they started selling ski googles and it is now one of the reason they are known all around the world. Oakley also sells sunglasses, clothing, watches, both for men and women. This company is recognized all across the world for its high quality products and its innovative designs.
Marketing – Target Market
Since Oakley sells sunglasses, goggles, apparel, bags and accessories it is right to say that they are consumer…show more content… As it is mentioned in the textbook, this king of distribution means placing your products only with preferred retailers (or establishing your stores only in limited locations) (Kelly et al.). Its products are sold through 32 O Store retail stores, 2 outlet stores, as well as 15,600 locations in the United States including optical stores, sunglass retailers, specialty sports stores for bikes, surfs, skis and golf, athletic footwear and sporting goods stores. Internationally, it has 11 O Store retail stores indifferent countries and products are sold over 100 countries with direct operations in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Mexico, Japan and Canada. Oakley, Inc. has 550 patents and 875 trademarks that include Square Wire®, Straight Jacket®, Kevlar®, Big Smoke®, Crush®, Bullet®, TimeBomb® and many more (Sumyla). In conclusion, Oakley’s products cannot be found in stores like Walmart or Dollorama since they are high quality…show more content… By sponsorship, we mean that Oakley associates with an athletes or an event to show the company logo or to promote new products (BUSN). Oakley is currently using these two types of sponsorship. For example, at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, Oakley distributed green goggles with the Oakley sign on both sides of the goggles so people could easily see it and recognize the brand. It is clearly effective since the television number of viewers was about 21,4 millions at its prime time (Kissel). The other type of sponsorship that Oakley uses is the company-to-athlete sponsorship. Oakley has recruited a lot of athletes that now wear their products with proud. For example, there is the worldwide known snowboarder Shaun White, the Canadian Snowboarder Mark McMorris and 18 other snowboarders. Oakley also sponsors 20 skiers from all around the world. Since all these skiers and snowboarder appear on TV for many events, Oakley has a really good publicity. This also creates a “buzz marketing” which is a word-of-mouth distribution of the information (BUSN). The second promotion method used by Oakley is advertising. In 2013, they invested 11,3 million dollars on advertising. Advertising is defined as “non-personal communication, designed to influence a target audience with regard to a product” (BUSN). The way that Oakley does its advertising is similar to Nike. They are using the fact that people pay more and more