Week 10

Promotion Strategies

• Push strategy: focuses on channel members, aiming to push products into the market
• Pull strategy: focuses on end-consumers, creating demand for products in the market

Advertising

• Definition: paid, non-personal communication about an organization and its products transmitted to a target audience
• Advantages:
  • Control
  • Create images and appeals
  • Brand equity
  • Connects with the consumer
  • Wide reach, low cost per person
• Disadvantages:
  • Impersonal, one-way communication
  • Cost of media and production
  • Credibility
  • Clutter
  • Weak force
  • Difficult to measure effectiveness

Major Advertising Decisions

• Hierarchy of Effects (setting objectives)
• Creating the advertising message (encoding):
  • Copy: verbal portion of ads
  • Artwork: illustrations, images, layout
  • Illustrations: photos, drawings, graphs, charts, tables
  • Layout: physical arrangement of an ad's illustration and copy
  • Appeal: rational or emotional appeal styles

Public Relations

• Definition: PR activities to build good relations with the company's various stakeholders and manage unfavorable rumors, stories, and events
• Pros:
  • Credibility
  • Lower cost
  • Difficult to imitate for competition
  • Engage consumers and make them a part of the brand story
• Cons:
  • Less control
  • Variety of specialists required
  • Can be relatively time-consuming
• Tools: news (press) release
• Bad publicity: have a plan, gather information, get top management involved, respond quickly, coordinate all communications, be honest, and look for good news to offset bad

Promotion and Communication

• Definition: Promotion is communication used to build and maintain relationships by informing and persuading one or more target audiences
• Communication: a sharing of meaning between a sender and a receiver, involving both encoding and decoding processes, via a selected medium
• Functions of promotion:
  • To persuade consumers to choose one brand over others
  • To remind consumers to continue using certain products
  • To inform consumers about new products
  • To build relationships with customers
  • To assist with other elements of the marketing mix

The Communication Process

• Elements of the communication process:
  • Source/sender: a person, group, or organization with a meaning to share
  • Receiver: the individual, group, or organization that decodes a coded message
  • Encoding process: converting meaning into a series of signs or symbols
  • Message: the communication in physical form that goes from sender to receiver
  • Communications channel: the medium of transmission that carries the encoded message
  • Decoding process: converting signs or symbols into concepts and ideas
  • Noise: anything that reduces a communication's clarity and accuracy
  • Feedback: the receiver's response to a message as perceived by the sender

Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC)

• Definition: the coordination of promotional efforts for maximum informational and persuasive impact on customers
• Major goal: to send a consistent message to customers and to other stakeholders
• Foster long-term customer relationships and more efficient use of promotional resources
• IMC: a process that evaluates the strategic role of various communication disciplines and combines them to provide clarity, consistency, and maximum communications impact

Personal Selling

• Definition: paid personal communication that attempts to inform customers and persuade them to purchase products in an exchange situation
• Advantages:
  • Provides greatest freedom to adjust message
  • Customise delivery and message, greater influence
  • Most precise focus on sales prospects
  • Feedback from salespeople can improve the marketing mix
  • Often the closest relationship with customers
  • Usually most expensive element in the promotion mix
  • Limited reach
  • Time-consuming

Test your knowledge of marketing strategies, including push and pull approaches, and advertising techniques.