Marketing - Promotion

Promotion - Marketing communication designed to influence consumer purchase decisions through information, persuasion, and reminders.

Integrated marketing communication - The coordination of marketing messages through every promotional vehicle to communicate a unified impression about a product.

Positioning statement - A brief statement that articulates how the marketer would like the target market to envision a product relative to the competition.

Promotional channels - Specific marketing communication vehicles, including traditional tools, such as advertising sales promotion, direct marketing, and personal selling, and newer tools such as product placement advergaming, and Internet minimovies.  

Product placement - The paid integration of branded products into movies, television, and other media.

Advergaming - Video games created as a marketing tool, usually with brand awareness as the core goal.

Buzz marketing - The active stimulation of word-of-mouth via unconventional and often relatively low-cost, tactics.  Other terms for buzz marketing are “guerilla marketing” and “viral marketing”.

Sponsorship - A deep association between a marketer and a partner (usually a cultural or sporting event), which involves promotion of the sponsor in exchange for either payment or the provision of goods. 

Advertising - Paid, nonpersonal communication, designed to influence a target audience with regards to a product, service, organization, or idea.

Sales promotion - Marketing activities designed to stimulate immediate sales activity through specific short-term programs aimed at either consumers or distributors.

Consumer promotion - Marketing activities designed to generate immediate consumer sales, using tools such as premiums, promotional products, samples, coupons, rebates, and displays.

Trade promotion - Marketing activities designed to stimulate wholesalers and retailers to push specific products more aggressively over the short term.

Public Relations (PR) - The ongoing effort to create positive relationships with all of a firm’s different “publics”, including customers, employees, suppliers, the community, the general public, and the government.

Publicity - Unpaid stories in the media that influence perceptions about a company or its products.

Personal selling - The person-to-person presentation of products to potential buyers.

Push strategy - A marketing approach that involves motivating distributors to heavily promote - or “push” - a product to the final consumers, usually through heavy trade promotion and personal selling.

Pull strategy - A marketing approach that involves creating demand from the ultimate consumer so that they “pull” your products through the distribution channels by actively seeking them.