Sales Promotion

Sales Promotion

Sales promotion - Sales promotions are short-term incentives to encourage the purchase or sale of a product or service.

Sales promotion includes several communications activities that attempt to provide added value or incentives to consumers, wholesalers, retailers, or other organizational customers to stimulate immediate sales. These efforts can attempt to stimulate product interest, trial, or purchase. Examples of devices used in sales promotion include coupons, samples, premiums, point-of-purchase (POP) displays, contests, rebates, and sweepstakes.


Examples of coupons, free trials, and rebates. Sales Promotion Strategies
There are three types of sales promotion strategies: Push, Pull, or a combination of the two.
A push strategy involves convincing trade intermediary channel members to "push" the product through the distribution channels to the ultimate consumer via promotions and personal selling efforts. The company promotes the product through a reseller who in turn promotes it to yet another reseller or the final consumer. Trade-promotion objectives are to persuade retailers or wholesalers to carry a brand, give a brand shelf space, promote a brand in advertising, and/or push a brand to final consumers. Typical tactics employed in push strategy are: allowances, buy-back guarantees, free trials, contests, specialty advertising items, discounts, displays, and premiums.
A pull strategy attempts to get consumers to "pull" the product from the manufacturer through the marketing channel. The company focuses its marketing communications efforts on consumers in the hope that it stimulates interest and demand for the product at the end-user level. This strategy is often employed if distributors are reluctant to carry a product because it gets as many consumers as possible to go to retail outlets and request the product, thus pulling it through the channel. Consumer-promotion objectives are to entice consumers to try a new product, lure customers away from competitors’ products, get consumers to "load up" on a mature product, hold & reward loyal customers, and build consumer relationships. Typical tactics employed in pull strategy are: samples, coupons, cash refunds and rebates, premiums, advertising specialties, loyalty programs/patronage rewards, contests, sweepstakes, games, and point-of-purchase (POP) displays.
Car dealers often provide a good example of a combination strategy. If you pay attention to car dealers' advertising, you will often hear them speak of cash-back offers and dealer incentives.

Concept Marketing

Introduction

---

Company Orientations to the Marketplace

What philosophy should guide a company marketing and selling efforts?  What relative weights should be given to the interests of the organization, the customers, and society? These interest often clash, however, an organization’s marketing and selling activities should be carried out under a well-thought-out philosophy of efficiency, effectiveness, and socially responsibility.

Five orientations (philosophical concepts to the marketplace have guided and continue to guide organizational activities:

1.         The Production Concept

2.         The Product Concept

3.         The Selling Concept

4.         The Marketing Concept

5.         The Societal Marketing Concept

---

The Five Concepts Described

            The Production Concept. This concept is the oldest of the concepts in business.  It holds that consumers will prefer products that are widely available and inexpensive. Managers focusing on this concept concentrate on achieving high production efficiency, low costs, and mass distribution.  They assume that consumers are primarily interested in product availability and low prices.  This orientation makes sense in developing countries, where consumers are more interested in obtaining the product than in its features.

            The Product Concept. This orientation holds that consumers will favor those products that offer the most quality, performance, or innovative features.  Managers focusing on this concept concentrate on making superior products and improving them over time. They assume that buyers admire well-made products and can appraise quality and performance. However, these managers are sometimes caught up in a love affair with their product and do not realize what the market needs.  Management might commit the “better-mousetrap” fallacy, believing that a better mousetrap will lead people to beat a path to its door. 

            The Selling Concept. This is another common business orientation. It holds that consumers and businesses, if left alone, will ordinarily not buy enough of the selling company’s products.  The organization must, therefore, undertake an aggressive selling and promotion effort.  This concept assumes that consumers typically sho9w buyi8ng inertia or resistance and must be coaxed into buying.  It also assumes that the company has a whole battery of effective selling and promotional tools to stimulate more buying. Most firms practice the selling concept when they have overcapacity.  Their aim is to sell what they make rather than make what the market wants.

            The Marketing Concept.  This is a business philosophy that challenges the above three business orientations.  Its central tenets crystallized in the 1950s.  It holds that the key to achieving its organizational goals (goals of the selling company) consists of the company being more effective than competitors in creating, delivering, and communicating customer value to its selected target customers. The marketing concept rests on four pillars:  target market, customer needs, integrated marketing and profitability.

            Distinctions between the Sales Concept and the Marketing Concept:

           

1.         The Sales Concept focuses on the needs of the seller.  The Marketing Concept focuses on the needs of the buyer. 

2.         The Sales Concept is preoccupied with the seller’s need to convert his/her product into cash.  The Marketing Concept is preoccupied with the idea of satisfying the needs of the customer by means of the product as a solution to the customer’s problem (needs).

            The Marketing Concept represents the major change in today’s company orientation that provides the foundation to achieve competitive advantage.  This philosophy is the foundation of consultative selling. 

            The Marketing Concept has evolved into a fifth and more refined company orientation:  The Societal Marketing Concept. This concept is more theoretical and will undoubtedly influence future forms of marketing and selling approaches.

            The Societal Marketing Concept. This concept holds that the organization’s task is to determine the needs, wants, and interests of target markets and to deliver the desired satisfactions more effectively and efficiently than competitors (this is the original Marketing Concept).  Additionally, it holds that this all must be done in a way that preserves or enhances the consumer’s and the society’s well-being.

            This orientation arose as some questioned whether the Marketing Concept is an appropriate philosophy in an age of environmental deterioration, resource shortages, explosive population growth, world hunger and poverty, and neglected social services. 

Are companies that do an excellent job of satisfying consumer wants necessarily acting in the best long-run interests of consumers and society?   

            The marketing concept possibily sidesteps the potential conflicts among consumer wants, consumer interests, and long-run societal welfare. Just consider:

The fast-food hamburger industry offers tasty buty unhealthy food. The hamburgers have a high fat content, and the restaurants promote fries and pies, two products high in starch and fat.  The products are wrapped in convenient packaging, which leads to much waste.  In satisfying consumer wants, these restaurants may be hurting consumer health and causing environmental problems.

Types of Marketing

In our journey through the captivating world of guerrilla marketing, we’ve seen some interesting sights. The birth of the concept, its evolution, the big corporations that play the guerrilla game, the viral nature of some campaigns, and gmarketing for social causes have all caught our attention as we stroll along Advertising Street.

(Check out our complete Guide to Guerrilla Marketing.)

Coming up on your left is a peculiar little place. It’s a squat building with the windows blacked out. A security guard stands sentry over the single entrance and regards passers-by suspiciously. This, friends, is where new guerrilla marketing methods are cooked up and shipped out hot and fresh to you, the unwitting consumer. The details of what goes on in there are tightly guarded, but we’ve got a key. One of the main advantages of guerrilla marketing is that it’s unexpected. It catches us off guard and causes an emotional response: laughter, shock or sadness are great sellers. It’s easy to see why marketers would rather you didn’t know just how they’re using guerrilla marketing to their advantage. If you know their secrets, you may just stop responding.

It probably doesn’t come as a surprise that marketers are a clever bunch. They are well versed in the principles of human psychology that make us want to buy what they’re selling. Anyone who has ever taken a marketing class will probably recognize the psychological principles used to sell us things: reciprocity, authority, consistency/commitment, social proof/acceptance, and scarcity/urgency. And in the methods we’ll explain below, you can find each and every one of those principles. In this installment of our guerrilla marketing series we will take a closer look at some unusually interesting types including ambient marketing, presence marketing, grassroots marketing, wild posting, undercover marketing and astroturfing.

We took a look at viral marketing back in part four of this series. This is a highly visible form of guerrilla marketing these days. A viral campaign can’t be planned or predicted, but it is dearly hoped for by marketers. A successful viral campaign uses existing communication networks (you tell two friends, they each tell two friends, and so on), doesn’t require much in terms of resources, and has the potential to be unstoppable. If you’re giving something away, even better. Remember Gmail invites? They were somewhat difficult to get at first, so everyone wanted one.

Ambient marketing allows a business to create brand recognition without necessarily pushing their products. One excellent example is the Dancing Grass Vans of London. Owned by renegade smoothie makers (and brilliant marketers) Innocent, the vans are covered in real, growing grass and can often be seen around the city making deliveries and drawing stares. Because they serve a real purpose (delivering smoothies), the vans don’t look like advertisements. But do you forget the name of a company with grass-covered vans? Never. Leading up to the release of the Simpsons Movie, 7-11 transformed some of their stores to look just like Kwik-E-Marts, complete with weird Springfield-type products. This ambient marketing campaign was ridiculously effective.

Presence marketing is along the same lines as ambient marketing. It’s about making the business name recognizable and familiar and always there. You know that saying, “out of sight, out of mind?” It goes double for products that don’t maintain a constant presence. This can be achieved through product placements in movies and TV shows, stalls at local festivals and markets, regular Twitter updates, or whatever else makes that product name visible daily. Small businesses and entrepreneurs with modest marketing budgets often find that presence marketing delivers an excellent return for their investment. All they really have to do is be visible.

Grassroots marketing is gaining popularity like – well, like a grass fire. A grassroots campaign can take on many forms, but for the most part it is about winning customers one-by-one rather than on a very large scale. Some grassroots campaigns have elements of presence marketing (like posting on message boards relevant to your business) or viral marketing (like the above user-generated Sony ad). A successful grassroots campaign is all about building relationships and emphasizing the personal connection, not about broadcasting your message and hoping potential customers are listening.

Wild postings may seem old-fashioned, but they are still wildly popular with indie bands and products that want to portray that indie image. Have you ever walked down a city street and seen a wall plastered with multiple copies of a poster for a movie, concert, or alcoholic beverage? Those would be wild postings, and part of their effectiveness lies in the way that they can make us believe we’re witnessing something momentous. Most of us would love to have a poster from the wild posting days of the Beatles, right? So you’d better grab that Smirnoff Ice poster now while you can, right?

Would you rather have your advertising handed to you? Tissue-pack advertising was made popular in Japan, but today it’s spreading to infiltrate the rest of the world. Knowing that advertising fliers were almost never accepted, much less read, Japanese businesses began to hand out pocket packs of tissues with ads on them. This simple but ingenious marketing method works because, well, who would turn down free stuff? Because the giveaway is a useful item, it stays close to the target consumer until it’s been used up. These days, you’d be hard pressed to find pocket packs of tissues in Japanese shops because they are so readily available for free.

Undercover marketing, also known as buzz marketing, is said to be one of the more devious ways of marketing to the masses. Remember the “buy me a drink” girls from part two of this series? These lovely young vixens were being paid to create a buzz around a certain beverage without ever letting you in on their dirty little secret: they were being paid to be so friendly. Undercover marketing/buzz marketing is all about selling something to someone who has no idea they’ve just witnessed a sales pitch.

Astroturfing is widely considered to be the slimiest of all guerrilla marketing practices. It involves creating an artificial buzz about a product or company, and it’s mighty risky in the information age. Postings are created in online forums, singing the praises of a certain product or service – but they aren’t made by the public. They’re made by shills, or people associated with the company who are paid to express a positive opinion. Astroturfing is rampant online in forums and blogs (actually “flogs,” or fake blogs), but you can still see the odd IRL astroturfer wandering department stores, lobbying Congress, and writing letters to newspaper editors.

Alternative marketing is referenced consistently by marketers, but it is by nature challenging to define. It may be best defined as publicity that looks like it is completely removed from the company itself. For example, when Paris Hilton’s Sidekick was hacked, sales of Sidekicks jumped overnight. While T-Mobile probably (maybe?) had nothing to do with that publicity, it was excellent marketing for them. In fact, it has been suggested more than once that the whole event was an orchestrated publicity stunt. Alternative marketing takes a good deal of imagination and a healthy dose of luck to pull off. If the public finds out that they’ve been duped, it will spell disaster for the campaign.

Experiential marketing is increasingly embraced by all types of companies and brands today. It’s becoming easier for us to tune out and ignore advertisements today, so experiential marketing aims to give you an experience rather than send you a one-way message. Experiential marketing lets you interact with the product and associate your immediate emotional responses with that brand. The Charmin Pottypalooza bathrooms at state fairs and the semi-permanent ones (now gone) in New York City are an unprecedented example of effective experiential marketing.
How many of these methods have you seen just this week? With new concepts being rolled out all the time, it’s not always easy to spot when you’ve been targeted.

Advertising

What exactly is advertising?

In its simplest terms, Advertising:
1. Identifies a current problem / opportunity for the product, service or corporate brand
2. Identifies the customers who can best solve / create that problem / opportunity
3. Creates the most relevant and distinctive way of communicating to them in creative & media terms
Traditional views of advertising included:

“Advertising is any paid-for communication overtly intended to inform and/or influence one or more people.”
Jeremy Bullmore, Director, WPP

“Advertising says to people, 'Here's what we've got. Here's what it will do for you. Here's how to get it.”
Leo Burnett

“I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information.”
David Ogilvy

Increasingly, though, definitions of advertising have had to take on board new communications opportunities.  The explosion of media channel opportunities, and digital and web 2.0 technology in particular, have made the advertising environment much more complex.
Different media channels and different communications opportunities require different approaches.
Now agencies use a variety of different models of communication:
- persuasion
- engagement
- participation
- facilitation
- conversation

Marketing

what is marketing?

What is marketing?

There are many different definitions of marketing. Consider some of the following alternative definitions:

“The all-embracing function that links the business with customer needs and wants in order to get the right product to the right place at the right time”

“The achievement of corporate goals through meeting and exceeding customer needs better than the competition”

“The management process that identifies, anticipates and supplies customer requirements efficiently and profitably”

“Marketing may be defined as a set of human activities directed at facilitating and consummating exchanges”

Which definition is right? In short, they all are. They all try to embody the essence of marketing:
• Marketing is about meeting the needs and wants of customers;
• Marketing is a business-wide function – it is not something that operates alone from other business activities;
• Marketing is about understanding customers and finding ways to provide products or services which customers demand
To help put things into context, you may find it helpful to often refer to the following diagram which summarises the key elements of marketing and their relationships: