Promotion Tools and Its Nature

The Promotion Mix

An organization’s total promotion mix is also called its marketing communications mix consists of a specific combination of advertising, public relations, personal selling, sales promotion, and direct-marketing tools that the organization uses for the persuasive communication, customer value and build customer relationships. The five major promotion tools are described as follows:

Advertising:

Advertising is paid form of nonpersonal presentation and also promotion of the several components of ideas, goods, or services by the identified sponsor.

Sales promotion:

Sales promotion is the short-term incentives for the encouragement of the purchase or sale of any product or service.

Personal selling:

Personal presentation by the sales force of firms for making the sales and building the relationship with the customers.

Public relations:

Building good relations with the firm’s different publics by achieving favorable publicity, handling or heading off unfavorable rumors, stories, and events and building up a good corporate image,

Direct marketing:

Direct marketing refers to the direct connections with carefully targeted individual customers for the purpose of obtaining an immediate response and cultivates lasting relationships with the customers.

The Nature of Each Promotion Tool

The promotional tool has unique characteristics and costs. Marketers must have to understand these characteristics while shaping the promotion mix.

Advertising

Advertising can reach to masses of geographically dispersed buyers at a low cost per exposure, and it also enables the seller to repeat a message many times. For example, advertisement on television can reach huge audiences. An estimated 106 million Americans watched the most recent Super Bowl, about 42 million people watched at least part of the last Academy Awards broadcast, and 30 million fans tuned in for the first episode of the ninth season of American Idol. For organizations which want to reach a mass audience, TV is the major promotional try to view advertised products as more legitimate because of advertising’s public nature. It is also very expressive; it allows the organization to dramatize its products through the artful use of visuals, sound , print and color. On the one hand, advertising can be used for building up a long-term image for any product (such as ads of Coca-Colas). On the other hand, advertising helps in triggering quick sales . Advertising also has some shortcomings. Although it reaches maximum people quickly, advertising is impersonal and it can’t be as directly persuasive as can company salespeople. On the most part, advertising can carry on only a one-way communication with a customer, and the customer does not feel that it has to pay attention or respond. In addition, advertising can also be very costly. Although some advertising forms, like newspaper and radio advertising, can be done on smaller budgets, other forms, like network TV advertising, require huge budgets.

Personal Selling

Personal selling is one of the most effective tools at a certain period of the buying process, particularly while building up buyers’ preferences, convictions, and actions. It includes personal interaction between two or more people, so each person can observe the other’s characteristics and needs and make quick adjustments. Personal selling allows all kinds of consumer relationships to spring up, ranging from selling relationships to personal friendships. An effective salesperson keeps the interest of customers at heart for building a long-term relationship by solving a customer’s problems. Finally, with personal selling, the buyer normally feels a greater need to listen and respond, even when the response is a polite “No thank you.” These unique qualities come at a cost, however. A sales force required a longer-term commitment than does advertising— advertising could be turned up or down, but the size of a sales force is difficult to change. Personal selling is also the organization’s most expensive promotion tool, costing companies on average $350 or more per sales call, depending on the industry. U.S. firms spend up to three times as much on personal selling as they do on advertising.

Sales Promotion.

Sales promotion consists of a wide assortment of tools—coupons, cents-off deals, contests ,premiums, and others—all of that have many unique qualities. They attract public attention, offer strong incentives to purchase, and also can be used for dramatizing the offer of the products and increase sagging sales. Sales promotions invite and reward fast response. Advertising emphasizes on, “Buy our product,” sales promotion emphasize on, “Buy it now.” Sales promotion effects are often short term, however, and normally are not as effective as the advertising or personal selling for building long-run brand preference as well as relationships with the customers.

Public Relations

Public Relations is much believable—news stories, sponsorships features, and events seem more real and believable for the readers than advertising do. Personal Relation can also reach to many prospects who avoid salespeople and advertisements—the message gets to the purchaser as “news” rather than as a sales-directed communication. As with advertising, the personal relation can dramatize an organization or product. Marketers try to underuse personal relation or use it as an afterthought. Yet a well-thought-out personal relation campaign used with other promotion mix elements could be very effective and economical.

Direct Marketing

In spite of being various forms of direct marketing—direct mail and catalogs, online marketing, telephone marketing and others—they all share four distinctive characteristics. Direct marketing is less public: The message is usually directed to a specific person. Direct marketing is immediate and customized: Messages can be prepared very fast and can be tailored to appeal to specific customers. Finally, direct marketing is interactive: It allows a conversation between the marketing team and the consumer, and messages could be altered depending on the consumer’s response. Hence, direct marketing is well suited for the highly targeted marketing efforts and building a one-to-one relationship with the customers.

Reference :

Kotler, P., & Armstrong, G. (2013).Principles of Marketing.Chennai: Pearson India Education Services Pvt Ltd