Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Business Marketing

In the early 1940s, New Era was providing caps for a long list of minor league, local, canadian, and college baseball teams. They also sold many plain caps to small stores and the small stores put patches and decoration on the cap and sold it at the store. By 1974, 20 of the 24  pro teams were using New Era's caps which put New Era on a national scale. New Era also sold caps to the military soldiers during World War II. As a result of great business marketing, New Era's motto was "the caps the pros wear". In 93', New Era signed its first exclusive license with MLB to produce ALL caps for ALL teams, which took about 59 years to accomplish since securing their first time, the Cleveland Indians.  New Era now holds over 200 licenses to produce hats for, some include: MLB, Little League Baseball, National Hockey League, NBA, Collegiate Licensing Company, Minor League Baseball, Baseball Canada, USA Hockey, Harwood Classics, Arena Football League, and theTaylor-Made Titleist.
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Monday, May 2, 2011

Segmenting and targeting markets

New Era serves many markets such as children, women, action sports, fashion, and suburban.



On August 24, 2007, three New York Yankee fitted caps were pulled from New Era's shelves because they were considered tailor made for three well known gangs: The Crips, The Bloods, and Latin Kings. Each hat was white with the respective gang colored bandana wrapped around the hat. To show the support of the hats being pulled, the yankees joined an anti-gang group called Peace on the Street. The yankees and MLB claimed to be unaware of the gang symbols and colors linked to the hats and they also claim that they didn't see the hats before they were released to the market. Consumers protested in front of any stores that were still selling any of the gang colored caps. Ultimately, New Era said they would try to increase their knowledge of gang colors and symbols.

Here is a video about the protesting of the New Era gang caps I ran across on Youtube: