Marketing Chapter 7: Promotion

Study Notes

Effective promotion is communication that informs, persuades, and reminds potential buyers to influence their opinion or elicit a response.
The main function of a marketer's promotional strategy is to convince target customers that the goods and services offered provide a competitive advantage over the competition.

Informing: seeks to convert an existing need into a want or to stimulate interest in a new product, prevalent during early stages of the product life cycle.
Persuading: designed to stimulate a purchase or an action, becomes the main promotion goal when the product enters the growth stage of its life cycle.
Reminding: used to keep the product and brand name in the public's mind, prevails during the maturity stage of the life cycle.

AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action, a concept used to understand how promotion influences consumer behavior.

A combination of advertising, public relations, sales promotion, and personal selling used to achieve promotional goals.

Target market characteristics: target market with widely scattered potential customers, highly informed buyers, and brand-loyal repeat purchasers requires a promotional mix with more advertising and sales promotion and less personal selling.
Type of buying decision: routine consumer decisions require attention to the brand or reminders, while complex decisions require more information and persuasion.
Available funds: money or lack of it affects the promotional mix, a small, undercapitalized manufacturer may rely on free publicity.
Push and pull strategies: push strategy uses aggressive personal selling and trade advertising to convince wholesalers or retailers to carry and sell merchandise, while pull strategy stimulates consumer demand.

Institutional advertising: promotes the corporation as a whole and is designed to establish, change, or maintain the corporation's identity.
Major types of advertising: institutional, brand awareness, and promotional.

Tools for consumer sales promotion: coupons, rebates, premiums, loyalty marketing, contests, sweepstakes, sampling, and point-of-purchase (P-O-P) promotions.
Online sales promotions: expanded dramatically in recent years, generating response rates three to five times higher than off-line promotions.

Advantages of personal selling: provides detailed explanation or demonstration of the product, allows for variation of the sales message, can be directed only to qualified prospects, costs can be controlled, and is more effective in obtaining a sale and gaining a satisfied customer.
Steps in the selling process: not explicitly stated in the text, but typically includes prospecting, pre-approach, approach, presentation, handling objections, and closing.