BY BRANDON BOYD

Unit 30- Company & Product (Television

Advertisement)

What is “GoPro” and who is it aimed at?

The GoPro organisation formerly known as Woodman Labs, is an American manufacturer of action cameras is often used in videoing and getting picture of extreme action. They dominate the camera market today, but they are seeing lots of competition from the likes of GMRN, Polaroid, Panasonic, Nikon and Sony. (Kodak were also a competitor but they stopped selling their products).

The main target audience for the GoPro’s is people who are passionate about sports or people who want to capture emotion and share their visions of the world with people all across the world.

History of the GoPro

The company was founded in 2002 by a man named Nick Woodman. He started the company following a trip to Australia in which he realised he wanted to capture good quality action photos and footages of his surfing, but couldn’t because amateur photographers were not able to get close enough or obtain the correct equipment at a reasonable price.

In 2004, the company sold its first camera system which used 35 mm film. The digital still and video cameras were later introduced. From 2014 onwards, a fixed-lens HD video camera with a wide 170-degree range angle of footage was available; two or more being able to pair together to create a 360-degree video.

Birth of the Company

GoPro’s success has been so pronounced, and yet so unflashy, that it is easy to forget that the company launched and flourished just at the moment that digital cameras began to get crushed by Apple, Samsung and various other competing camera-phones. But GoPro — which Tuesday announced an updated version of its flagship camera, the Hero 3+, along with a new batch of ancillary products — sold a reported 2.3 million cameras last year alone, to the tune of $521 million. Its founder, Nick Woodman, is a billionaire. With 6.3 million Face book likes, the camera originally associated with the extreme-sports crowd has exited the skate park, with cultish fans putting its products to a huge range of uses (and uploading the results to YouTube)..

Brand Elements

(1) Name: GoPro (2) Logo: 4 boxes with different shades to represent different uses of the

product; >Motorcross, downhill biking & cross-country biking >Surfing >Underwater activities with the ability of the camera to withstand the

elements >Snow sports (3) Slogan: “Be a hero”- meaningful, likeable, memorable and

transferable because the desire transcends geographic and categorical boundaries

(4) Audio: Memorable sounds, paired with the logo (5) POV Videography: Footage technique strongly associated with

GoPro

GoPro HERO 4

In September of 2014, the company announced the departure of their HERO3 GoPro’s with the release of their HERO4 which is available in Black or Silver. It still has a 12mp CMOS and a f/2.8 maximum aperture and focus free lens. The HERO4 is also capable of Bluetooth connectivity with speeds up-to twice as fast as the HERO3. This new addition can also film in 4K video, (3840X2160) at the frame rate of 24-25 and 30 fps.

The silver addition of the HERO3 is similar to the black version, but the silver also had a built in touch screen display, for photo and highlight tag. Both of the HERO4 models maintain the h.264 video codec of previous versions and MP3 file formats. GoPro claims the mono microphone in both the Black and Silver editions have twice the dynamic ranges of the HERO3+, and that the HERO4 Black and Silver additions have improved their low light performances.