Product promotion and promotion mix

The promotion mix is the specific blend of advertising, sales promotion, public relations, personal selling, and direct-marketing tools that the company uses to persuasively communicate customer value and build customer relationships.

Product Promotion

It is a type of promotion that a business uses to convince potential customers to buy products from them and not their competitors.

Advertising is any paid form of non-personal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods, or services by an identified sponsor. Advertising reaches masses of geographically dispersed buyers at a low cost per exposure and enables the seller to repeat a message many times. However it is impersonal, cannot be directly persuasive as personal selling, and can be expensive.

Sales promotion is the short-term incentives to encourage the purchase or sale of a product or service. Sales promotion includes coupons, contests, cents-off deals, and premiums that attract consumer attention and offer strong incentives to purchase. It can be used to dramatize product offers and to boost sagging sales.

Personal selling is the personal presentation by the firm’s sales force for the purpose of making sales and building customer relationships.Personal selling is the most effective method at certain stages of the buying process, particularly in building buyers’ preferences, convictions, and actions and developing customer relationships

Public relations involves building good relations with the company’s various publics by obtaining favorable publicity, building up a good corporate image, and handling or heading off unfavorable rumors, stories, and events. Public relations is a very believable form of promotion that includes new stories, features, sponsorships, and events.

Direct marketing involves making direct connections with carefully targeted individual consumers to both obtain an immediate response and cultivate lasting customer relationships – by using direct mail, telephone, direct-response television, e-mail, and the Internet to communicate directly with specific consumers. Direct marketing is a non-public, immediate, customized, and interactive promotional tool that includes direct mail, catalogs, telemarketing, and online marketing.

Each type of promotion has its own tools. Advertising includes print, broadcast, outdoor, and other forms. Personal selling includes sales presentations, trade shows, and incentive programs. Sales promotion includes point-of-purchase displays, premiums, discounts, coupons, specialty advertising, and demonstrations. Direct marketing includes catalogues, telemarketing, fax transmissions, and the Internet. Thanks to technological breakthroughs, marketers can now communicate through traditional media (newspapers, radio, telephone, and television), as well

as its newer forms (fax machines, cellular phones, pagers, and computers). These new technologies have encouraged more companies to move from mass communication to more targeted communication and one-on-one dialogue.

Viral Marketing

Viral marketing occurs when consumers pass on or recommend your product/company/website to others. This could be via email, or bulletin boards or word of mouth. There have been many well known online viral marketing campaigns. These include The Blair Witch Project and the establishment of Hotmail as a leading free email provider.

Firms are now structuring their businesses in a way that allows them to grow like a virus and lock out the existing brick and mortar competitors through innovative pricing and exploitation of competitors’ distribution channels. The beauty of this marketing technique is that none of it requires any marketing. Customers, who have caught the virus, do the selling. Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message’s exposure and influence. Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands, to millions.

Off the Internet, viral marketing has been referred to as “word-of-mouth”, “creating a buzz”, “leveraging the media” and even “network marketing.” It’s a deceptively simple concept: Create a message, send it via e-mail, and make it so compelling that recipients want to pass it on to everyone in their address book. Advertisers are hot on the tactic, and the idea of putting consumers to work spreading the word about a brand or service seems sound.

Promotional strategies include all means through which a company communicates the benefits and values of its products and persuades targeted customers to buy them (Kotler and Armstrong, 2004). The best way to understand promotion is through the concept of the marketing communication process. Promotion is the company strategy to cater for the marketing communication process that requires interaction between two or more people or groups, encompassing senders, messages, media and receivers (Lazer, 1971).

Push strategy involves the manufacturer using sales force and trade promotion to induce intermediaries to carry, promote and sell the product to end users (Kotler). Push strategy is normally appropriate where there is:

low brand loyalty in a category

brand choice is made in the store

the product is an impulse item

Pull strategy involves the manufacturer using advertising and consumer promotion to induce consumers to ask intermediaries for the product, thus inducing them to order it (Kotler). A “pull” selling strategy is one that requires high spending on advertising and consumer promotion to build up consumer demand for a product.

Pull strategy is appropriate where there is:

high brand loyalty

people perceive differences between brands

people choose the brand before they go to the store

AIDA is a communication model which can be used by firms to aid them in selling their product or services.AIDA is an Acronym for Attention, Interest,Desire, Action. When a product is launched the first goal is to grab attention, to think about how the organization use its skill to do this. Once attention have been grabbed the company should know how to hold the interest of the consumers through promoting features, clearly stating the benefit the product. The third stage is desire, it deals with how to make the product desirable to the consumer, maybe by demonstating it. The final stage is the purchase action, if the company has been successful with its successful with its strategy then the target customer should purchase the product.

There are many different types of promotional strategies a company can implement, and promotional products are just one of them. The company have complete campaign and strategy in place. Here are a few strategies that can be employed.

Media releases

Media releases are a great way to get information about your product, service or company out to a large amount of potential customers. If you can put information about your product into an interesting story then there is a chance your story will be picked up. Remember it must be interesting for people or it will not be grabbed.

Networking

Networking within your industry and clients is a great way to get yourself and you product noticed. Attend networking functions, have a good story or joke ready, and they will be sure to remember you for the right reasons.

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Promotional products

Promotional products can be used to accomplish several things. They can motivate customers to use your product or service, increase attendance at conferences or trade booths, thank loyal customers, for attracting staff, and for rewarding staff. When choosing a promotional product think of the goal you are trying to achieve.

things to promote the product

Merchandising/Point of Purchase

Billboards

Support Media, eg calendar