Marketing Communications

Role of Promotion in the Marketing Mix

  • Promotional Strategy: Optimal use of advertising, public relations, personal selling, and sales promotion.
  • Competitive Advantage: Unique features, excellent service, low prices, rapid delivery, high product quality.

Communication Process

  • Communication: Exchange of meanings through common symbols.
  • Categories: Interpersonal, mass, and marketing communication.
  • Senders: Develop messages, spot opportunities.
  • Receivers: Adapt messages, inform, persuade, remind.
  • Traditional advertising: Impersonal, numbers-driven, unquantifiable consumer behavior.
  • Internet/Social Media: Personal, direct, feedback-driven, highly visible.

Goals and Tasks of Promotion

  • Informing: Increase awareness, explain product, suggest uses, build image.
  • Persuading: Encourage switching, change perceptions, influence buying, persuade calls.
  • Reminding: Remind needs, remind where to buy, maintain awareness.
  • Connecting: Form relationships, encourage exchange, customers become advocates.

Promotional Mix Elements

  • Advertising: Distributed via traditional and non-traditional media.
    • Advantages: Large reach, low cost per contact, targeted.
    • Disadvantages: High total cost, expensive national reach.
  • Public Relations: Evaluates public attitudes and earns understanding.
    • Functions: Maintain image, educate, introduce products, support sales, generate publicity.
  • Sales Promotion: Stimulates consumer buying and dealer effectiveness.
    • Examples: Free samples, contests, premiums, trade shows, coupons.
  • Personal Selling: Planned presentation for making a sale.
    • Traditional Selling: Persuade buyer, win-lose.
    • Relationship Selling: Long-term, win-win.
  • Social Media: Facilitates online conversations.
    • Platforms: Blogs, microblogs, podcasts, social networks.
    • Uses: Manage brand image, engage consumers, generate interest.
  • Shifts in Communication: From one-way to customer-controlled.
    • Types: Consumer-generated, paid, earned, owned media.

AIDA Concept

  • AIDA: Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.
  • Stages: Cognitive (thinking), Affective (feeling), Conative (doing).

Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC)

  • IMC: Coordination of promotional messages for consistency at every contact point.
  • Growth Factors: Media choices, market fragmentation, shift from advertising to immediate response techniques.

Factors Affecting Promotional Mix

  • Factors: Product nature, PLC stage, target market, buying decision, funds, push/pull strategy.
  • Target Market: Widely scattered, informed buyers, brand loyalty favors advertising & sales promotion.
  • Buying Decision Type:
    • Routine: Advertising, Sales Promotion.
    • Neither Routine nor Complex: Advertising, Public Relations.
    • Complex: Personal Selling

Push vs. Pull Strategies

  • Push: Manufacturer promotes to wholesaler, who promotes to retailer, who promotes to consumer.
  • Pull: Manufacturer promotes to consumer, creating demand that pulls product through the channel.