1. Promotional Strategies
The rapid growth of search engine advertising is a great example of the creativity involved in the promotional element of the marketing mix. This chapter, the final discussion of the marketing function, explains how marketers set promotional goals and develop promotional mixes. The chapter then takes you through the major elements in the promotional mix: personal selling, advertising and direct marketing, sales promotion, and publication. The chapter wraps up with a look at integrated marketing communication.

2. What Is Promotion? Promotional Strategy Promotional Goals Product
Direct
Interaction
Indirect
Communication
Promotion may take the form of direct, face-to-face interaction or indirect communication through such media as floor ads, television, radio, magazines, newspapers, direct mail, billboards, the Internet, and other channels. How does a firm decide on which forms of promotion to use? Many companies develop a promotional strategy; that is, they define the direction and scope of the promotional activities they will take to meet their marketing objectives by setting promotional goals and developing a promotional mix.
Promotional Goals
Product
Variables
Promotional
Mix

3. Promotional Goals Inform Persuade Remind Attract New Customers
Sell to Existing
Customers
Aid
Distributors
Stabilize Sales
You can use promotion to achieve three basic goals: to inform, to persuade, and to remind. Informing is the first promotional priority, because people cannot buy something until they are aware of it and know what it can do for them. Potential customers need to know where the item can be purchased, how much it costs, and how to use it. Persuading is also an important priority, because most people need to be encouraged to purchase something new or to switch brands. Advertising that meets this goal is classified as persuasive advertising. Reminding the customer of the product’s availability and benefits is also important, because such reminders stimulate additional purchases. The term for such promotional efforts is reminder advertising.
Beyond these general goals, your promotional goals should accomplish specific objectives: They should attract new customers, increase usage among existing customers, aid distributors, stabilize sales, boost brand-name recognition, create sales leads, differentiate the product, and influence decision makers.
Boost Name
Recognition
Create Sales
Leads
Differentiate the
Product
Influence
Decision Makers

4. The Promotional Mix Activity Reach Timing Flexibility Cost/ Exposure
Personal
Selling
Direct Interaction
Limited Reach
Regular Contact
Tailored
Message
Relatively High
Advertising
Indirect Interaction
Large Reach
Regular Contact
Standard
Message
Low to Moderate
Direct
Marketing
Direct Interaction
Large Reach
Intermittent
Customized
Message
Relatively High
The promotional mix typically includes a blend of various elements. The most efficient mix depends on the nature of the market and the characteristics of the goods and services being marketed. Over time, the mix for a particular product may change.
Sales
Promotion
Indirect Interaction
Large Reach
Intermittent
Standard
Message
Varies
Public
Relations
Indirect Interaction
Large Reach
Intermittent
Standard
Message
No Direct Cost

5. Elements of Promotion Personal selling Advertising Direct marketing
Sales promotion
Public relations
A company’s promotional mix typically includes a blend of the following elements: personal selling, sales promotion, advertising, direct-marketing tools, and public relations that work best for the firm’s product variables, market, and desired objectives. The most effective mix depends on the nature of the market and the characteristics of the good or service being marketed. Over time, the mix for a particular product may change.

6. Product Variables Complexity Price Familiarity Life Cycle Advertising
Direct Marketing
Personal Selling
Sales Promotion
Public Relations
Complexity
Price
Familiarity
Life Cycle
Various types of products lend themselves to differing forms of promotion. Simple, familiar items such as laundry detergent can be explained adequately through advertising, but personal selling is generally required to communicate the features of unfamiliar and sophisticated goods and services such as office-automation equipment or municipal waste-treatment facilities. As this chapter will later explain, the complexity of a product and its familiarity in the marketplace will dictate the best forms of promotion to use.
The product’s price is another factor to consider in selecting an appropriate promotional mix. Inexpensive items such as shaving cream or breakfast cereal sold to a mass market are well suited to advertising and sales promotion, which have a relatively low per-unit cost. At the other extreme, products with a high unit price such as in-ground swimming pools lend themselves to personal selling because the high cost of a sales call is justified by the price of the product.
The product’s position in its life cycle also influences promotional choices. Early on, when the seller is trying to inform the customer about the product and build the distribution network, promotional efforts are in high gear. As the market expands during the growth phase, the seller broadens its advertising and sales-promotion activities to reach a wider audience and continues to use personal selling to expand the distribution network. When the product reaches maturity and competition is at its peak, the seller’s primary goal is to differentiate the product from rival brands. As the product begins to decline, the level of promotion generally tapers off. Advertising and selling efforts are carefully targeted toward loyal, steady customers.

7. Market Variables Target Market Market Strategy Clustered Dispersed
Personal
Selling
Product
Advertising
Intermediaries
Customers
Push
Strategy
Pull
Selection of an appropriate promotional mix is also influenced by the size and concentration of the target market. In markets with many widely dispersed buyers, advertising is generally the most economical way of communicating the product’s features. In markets with relatively few customers, particularly when they are clustered in a limited area, personal selling is a practical promotional alternative. Many marketers use a combination of methods.
When selecting a promotional mix, a firm must also decide whether it will focus its marketing effort on intermediaries or on final customers. If the focus is on intermediaries, the producer uses a push strategy to persuade wholesalers and retailers to carry the item. If the marketing focus is on end users, the producer uses a pull strategy to appeal directly to the ultimate customer, using advertising, direct mail, contests, discount coupons, and so on.

8. Personal Selling Customer-Oriented Marketing Partnerships with
Customers
Even with the rapid advance of e-commerce and other marketing technologies, personal selling remains a fundamentally important part of the promotional mix. As with other elements of the marketing mix, personal selling has evolved over the years to support the contemporary idea of the customer-oriented marketing concept. In this sense, personal selling has evolved from peddling products to creating partnerships with customers.

9. Types of Sales Personnel
High
Low
Creative
Selling
Order Getters
Sales Support
Order Takers
Low
Order
Processing
By almost any measure, personal selling is the dominant form of promotional activity. Most companies spend twice as much on personal selling as they do on all other marketing activities combined, even as technology is drastically changing the entire selling process. Regardless of their title, salespeople can be categorized according to three broad areas of responsibility: order getting, order taking, and sales support services.
Order getters are responsible for generating new sales and for increasing sales to existing customers. . Order getting is sometimes referred to as creative selling, particularly if the salesperson must invest a significant amount of time in determining what the customer needs, devising a strategy to explain how the product can meet those needs, and persuading the customer to buy.
Order takers do little creative selling; they primarily process orders. Regardless of how salespeople use the term, order takers in the true sense play an important role in the sales function. With the aim of generating additional sales, many companies are beginning to train their order takers to think more like order getters.
Sales support personnel generally don’t sell products, but they facilitate the overall selling effort by providing a variety of services. Their responsibilities can include looking for new customers, educating potential and current customers, building goodwill, and providing service to customers after the sale. The three most common types of sales support personnel are missionary, technical, and trade salespeople.
High

10. Support Functions Missionary Sales Technical Sales Trade Sales
The three most common types of sales support personnel are missionary, technical, and trade salespeople.
Missionary salespeople are employed by manufacturers to disseminate information about new products to existing customers (usually wholesalers and retailers) and to motivate them to sell the product to their customers. Manufacturers of pharmaceuticals and medical supplies use missionary salespeople to call on doctors and pharmacists. They leave samples and information, answer questions, and persuade doctors to prescribe their products.
Technical salespeople contribute technical expertise and assistance to the selling function. They are usually engineers and scientists or have received specialized technical training. In addition to providing support services to existing customers, they may also participate in sales calls to prospective customers. Companies that manufacture computers, industrial equipment, and sophisticated medical equipment use technical salespeople to sell their products as well as to provide support services to existing customers.
Trade salespeople sell to and support marketing intermediaries. Producers such as Hormel, Nabisco, and Sara Lee use trade salespeople to give in-store demonstrations, offer samples to customers, set up displays, restock shelves, and work with retailers to obtain more shelf space. Increasingly, producers work to establish lasting, mutually beneficial relationships with their channel partners, and trade salespeople are responsible for building those relationships.
Trade Sales

11. Personal Selling Process1
Prospecting
Preparing 2 3
Approaching
Personal selling is the interpersonal aspect of the promotional mix. It involves person-to-person presentation—face-to-face, by phone, or by interactive media such as Web TV’s video conferencing or customized websites—for the purpose of making sales and building customer relationships. Many salespeople follow a carefully planned seven-step process from start to finish:
Prospecting. Finding and qualifying potential buyers of the product or service.
Preparing. Considering various options for approaching the prospect and preparing for the sales call.
Approaching. Contacting the prospect, getting his or her attention, and building interest in the product or service.
Presenting. Communicating a message that persuades a prospect to buy.
Handling objections. Countering the buyer’s objections to purchasing a product or service with convincing claims.
Closing. Asking the prospect to buy the product.
Following up. Checking customer satisfaction following the sale and building goodwill.
Presenting 4
Handling
Objections 5
Closing 6
Following Up 7

12. Advertising and Direct Marketing
Product Awareness
Product Image
Consumer Demand
All forms of product-related advertising have three objectives: to create product awareness, to create and maintain the image of a product, and to stimulate consumer demand.

13. Types of Advertising Product Institutional National and Local
Word of Mouth
Competitive Advertising, Comparative Advertising
Green Marketing, Corporate or Advocacy Advertising
Nationwide Coverage, Cooperative Advertising
Business professionals generally refer to advertising by its type.
Product advertising is the most common type, designed to sell specific goods or services. Product advertising generally describes the product’s features and may mention its price. The term competitive advertising is applied to those ads that specifically highlight how a product is better than its competitors. When two or more products are directly contrasted in an ad, the technique being used is comparative advertising.
Institutional advertising is designed to create goodwill and build a desired image for a company rather than to sell specific products. Green marketing creates an image of companies as corporate conservationists. When used as corporate advertising, institutional advertising often promotes an entire line of a company’s products. Institutional ads can also be used to remind investors that the company is doing well. Institutional ads that address public issues are called advocacy advertising.
Advertising can also be classified according to the sponsor. National advertising is sponsored by companies that sell products on a nationwide basis. In contrast, local advertising is sponsored by a local merchant. Grocery store ads in the local newspaper are a good example. Cooperative advertising is a financial arrangement in which companies with products sold nationally share the costs of local advertising with local merchants and wholesalers—a cross between local and national advertising.
Many companies with tight advertising budgets rely on word-of-mouth advertising to build their market share. Buzz marketing is similar to word-of-mouth advertising. Companies seek out trendsetters in communities and subtly push them into talking up a brand or product to friends and admirers.
Repeat Customers, Buzz Marketing

14. Advertising Appeals Logical Emotional Celebrity Sexual Audience
Service
Product
Celebrity
Sexual
All well-designed ads make a carefully planned appeal to whatever motivates the audience.
Some ads use a logical appeal to persuade the audience with data. When selling technical products, some industrial and high-tech marketers assume that logic is the only reasonable approach.
Even with the most unemotional sort of product, emotions can be a significant factor in the decision process because all people have hopes, fears, desires, and dreams, regardless of the products they buy.
Using celebrities in ads is a common emotional appeal tactic. Celebrities can bring new value, excitement, humor and energy to a product that may not be possible with other types of advertising. The idea is that people will be more inclined to use products endorsed by a celebrity because they will identify with and want to be like the celebrity.
A tenant of advertising is that “sex sells.” The classic technique is to have an attractive, scantily attired model share the page or TV screen with the product. The model may bring nothing to the ad beyond a visual focus point. The goal is to have the audience associate the product with pleasure.
Target Market

15. Advertising Media Media Plan Media Mix
Choosing the right media, or channels of communication, can be as important as selecting the type of advertising. Your media plan is a document that shows your advertising budget, the schedule of when your ads will appear, and a discussion of the media mix, the combination of print, broadcast, online, and other media used for the advertising campaign.
When selecting the media mix, the first step is to determine the characteristics of the target audience and the types of media that will reach the largest audience at the lowest cost per exposure. The choice is also based on what the medium can do, since the various media excel in different ways. The second step in choosing the media mix is to pick specific vehicles in each of the chosen media categories, such as individual magazines, websites, or radio stations.

16. Major Advertising Media
Newspapers
Television
Direct Mail
Internet
Magazines
Radio
Each of the major advertising media has advantages and disadvantages.
Newspapers. The advantages include extensive market coverage, low cost, short lead time for printing ads, good local market coverage, and geographic selectivity. The disadvantages include poor graphic quality, short life span, cluttered pages, and visual competition from other ads.
Television. The advantages include great impact, broad reach, appealing to multiple senses, creative demonstration opportunities, high attention, and entertainment carryover. The disadvantages include high cost, less audience selectivity, long preparation time, commercial clutter, short life of message, vulnerable to remote controls, and media competition.
Direct Mail. The advantages include delivery of information to targeted audience, excellent control over message quality, and personalization. The disadvantages include high cost per contact, delivery delays, problems with mailing lists, customer resistance, and perception of junk mail.
. The advantages include low cost, fast preparation and delivery, and the ability to customize content and include hyperlinks. The disadvantages include being tainted by the deluge of SPAM.
Radio. Low cost, high frequency, immediacy, highly portable, and geographic/demographic targeting. The disadvantages include no visuals, short message life, commercial clutter, lower attention that television, and ease of switching stations.
Magazines. The advantages include good production quality, long life, local and regional targeting, authority and credibility, and multiple readers. The disadvantages include limited demonstration possibilities, long lead time between placing and publishing ads, high cost, and less compelling than other media.
Internet. The advantages include rich media options, creative flexibility, ease of changes and additions, hyper-linked web pages, and personalization. The disadvantages include difficulty in measuring audiences and effectiveness, customer resistance, increasing clutter, and fragmentation.

17. Developments in E-Mail Marketing
Legitimate
Marketers
Permission
Marketing
“Opt-In”
Choices
SPAM
Marketers
“Harvested”
Addresses
“Address
Guessing”
CAN-SPAM Act
of 2003
As anyone with an account knows, however, legitimate campaigns are now getting buried in a deluge of spam campaigns that vary from the suspicious to the down-and-out illegal. The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 attempted to address the situation by prohibiting with misleading subject lines or fake return addresses, but the results are not encouraging. Not only does spam continue to grow, but attempts to stem the flow through automated filtering are increasingly blocking from legitimate marketers.
Legitimate marketers take the time to develop lists of recipients who are truly interested in their messages and shun the use of both “harvested” address lists (in which addresses are automatically gathered from websites, blogs, chat groups, and so on) and “address guessing” (sending to every conceivable user name at a given domain name). Marketers that take the time to do it right can still reach receptive audiences through .

18. Developments in Online Media
Display Ads
Search Engine Ads
Blog Ads
Online advertising offers a number of compelling benefits, including timeliness (ads can be updated at any time with minimal cost), reach (the web reaches hundreds of millions of people worldwide), low cost (web ads tend to be much cheaper than comparable print or broadcast ads), and interactivity (audiences can get involved with both the ads themselves and with sales personnel via instant messaging and chat options). In addition to using their own websites and blogs as promotional platforms, online marketers can purchase online advertising in a variety of ways:
Display ads. Display ad is a general term for any ad that that includes both graphical elements in addition to text (the term also applies to print media). Online display ads are often called banner ads, although this also refers to one specific shape of ad (the wide, flat horizontal ad).
Search engine ads. Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and other websites have clearly demonstrated the power of search engine advertising, ads that are related to either the results of an online search or the content being displayed on other webpages.
Advertising on blogs. Many advertisers are now trying to harness the popularity of blogging as a means to reach audiences.

19. Sales Promotion Consumer Promotion Trade Promotion
The fourth element of promotion, sales promotion, consists of short-term incentives to encourage the purchase of a product or service. Because the impact of sales promotion activities is often short term, sales promotions are not as effective as advertising or personal selling in building long-term brand preference. Sales promotion consists of two basic categories: consumer promotion and trade promotion.

20. Consumer Sales Promotions
Coupons
Rebates
Point-of-Purchase
Special-Event Advertising
Samples
Premiums
Cross-Promotions
Specialty Advertising
Consumer promotion is aimed directly at final users of the product. Companies use a variety of consumer promotional tools and incentives to stimulate repeat purchases and to entice new users:
The biggest category of consumer promotion—and the most popular with consumers—is coupons, certificates that spur sales by giving buyers a discount when they purchase specified products.
With rebates, buyers generally get reimbursement checks from the manufacturer by submitting proofs of purchase along with a prepared manufacturer’s rebate form.
The point-of-purchase (POP) display is a device for showing a product in a way that stimulates immediate sales.
Samples are an effective way to introduce a new product, encourage nonusers to try an existing product, encourage current buyers to use the product in a new way, or expand distribution into new areas.
Sponsoring special events has become one of the most popular sales promotion tactics. Thousands of companies spend billions of dollars to sponsor events ranging from golf to opera.
With cross-promotion, one brand is used to advertise another, non-competing brand.
Other popular consumer sales promotion techniques include in-store demonstrations, loyalty and frequency programs such as frequent-flyer miles, and premiums, which are free or bargain-priced items offered to encourage the consumer to buy a product. Contests, sweepstakes, and games are also quite popular in some industries and can generate a great deal of public attention, particularly when valuable or unusual prizes are offered. Specialty advertising (on pens, calendars, T-shirts, and so on) helps keep a company’s name in front of customers for a long period of time.

21. Trade Sales Promotion Trade Allowances Display Premiums
Dealer Contests
Travel Bonus Programs
Trade Sales
Promotion
Although shoppers are more aware of consumer promotion, trade promotion actually accounts for the largest share of promotional spending. Trade promotions are aimed at inducing distributors or retailers to sell a company’s products. The most popular trade promotion is a trade allowance, which involves a discount on the product’s price or free merchandise that brings down the cost of the product. Their chief downside is that they can create the controversial practice of forward buying, in which the distributor stocks up on merchandise while the price is low.
Besides trade allowances, other popular trade promotions are display premiums, dealer contests or sweepstakes, and travel bonus programs. All are designed to motivate distributors or retailers to push particular merchandise.

22. Public Relations News Conferences News Releases Community Relations
Public relations (PR), the fifth element of promotion, plays a vital role in the success of most companies, and that role applies to more than just the marketing of goods and services. Smart businesspeople know that a good reputation is one of a business’s most important assets, and PR helps build, maintain, and repair reputations as needed. The PR activity is as diverse as the company’s range of stakeholders, including community relations, product publicity, government affairs (“lobbying”), investor relations, and press relations.
Two standard public relations tools are the news release and the news conference. A news release, or press release, is a short memo sent to the media covering topics that are of potential news interest; a video news release is a brief video clip sent to television stations. Companies use news releases to get favorable news coverage about themselves and their products. When a business has significant news to announce, it will often arrange a news conference.
Community
Relations
Product
Publicity
Government
Affairs
Investor
Relations
Press
Relations

23. Integrated Marketing Communications
IMC
Consistency
Public
Relations
Personal
Selling
Product
Advertising
Direct
Marketing
Sales
Promotion
Clarity
Impact
With five major promotional methods available—personal selling, advertising, direct marketing, sales promotion, and public relations—how do you decide on the right mix for your product? Coordinating promotional and communication efforts is becoming vital if a company is to send a consistent message and boost that message’s effectiveness.
Integrated marketing communications (IMC) is a strategy of coordinating and integrating all one’s communications and promotional efforts to provide customers with clarity, consistency, and maximum communications impact. Properly implemented, IMC increases marketing and promotional effectiveness.
Effectiveness