Marketing Management and Planning, Marketing Mix: Promotion

Communication Model

 Marketers often choose celebrity endorsers as sources to make their messages more believable or their products more attractive to the buyers

Pictures truly can communicate important information to consumers, often more quickly, and more memorably, than can the ad copy.

The Traditional Communication Model:
One-to-Many

•       Promotion: The coordination of marketing communication efforts to influence attitudes or behavior

•       Marketing communications purpose:

Ø  Inform 

Ø  Remind

Ø  Persuade

Ø  Build relationships

•       Integrated marketing communication (IMC): Process that marketers use to plan, develop, execute, and evaluate coordinated, measurable, persuasive brand communication programs over time to targeted audiences

Three Models of Marketing Communication

Traditional promotional mix

—  A combination of promotional methods used to promote a specific product.

—  Elements of a promotion mix are:

Ø  Advertising

Ø  Sales Promotion

Ø  Personal Selling

Ø  Public Relations

Ø  Direct Marketing

Advertising:
The Image of Marketing

•       Advertising: Nonpersonal communication from an identified sponsor using mass media

•       Expenditures on traditional advertising are changing

•       Marketers are diverting more money into alternative media

•       Advertising is still best way to reach mass audiences

Each of the traditional media has pros and cons

•       Television

•       Radio

•       Newspapers

•       Magazines

Sales Promotion

•       Sales promotion

Ø  Programs designed to build interest in or encourage purchase of a product during a specified period of time

v  Deliver short-term sales results

v  Can target end consumers, channel partners, and/or employees

Ø  Contests, coupons, and other incentives designed to build interest or encourage product purchase during a specified period

Types of Consumer Sales Promotion

Consumer Sales Promotion Techniques:
A Sampler – 1

Personal Selling: Adding the Personal Touch to the Promotion Mix

•       Personal selling: Direct interaction between a company representative and a customer

Ø  Occurs when a company representative interacts directly with a prospect or customer to communicate about a good or service

Public Relations

•       Public relations (PR):

•       Communication activities that create or maintain a positive image of a firm and its products

•       Communication function that seeks to build good relationships with an organization’s publics

•       PR is critical when a firm’s image is at risk due to negative publicity

Objectives and Tactics of Public Relations

Direct Marketing

•       Direct marketing:

Ø  Efforts to gain a direct response from individual consumers

Ø  Any direct communication to a consumer or business recipient designed to generate a response in the form of an order, a request for further information, and/or a visit to a store or other place of business for purchase of a product

A Comparison of Elements of the Traditional Promotional

 The Updated Communication Model:  Many-to-Many

•       Groundswell: A social trend in which people use technology to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions such as corporations

•       The many-to-many communication model relies on consumers talking to one another

•       Buzz marketing is key

Buzz Marketing

Ø  consumers talking to each other about goods, services, or organizations

Ø  E.g. blogs, product review websites, interactive games, video clips

Ø  Hard to control: May produce positive or negative outcome to the company

New Social Media

•       Social media: Internet-based platforms that allow users to create their own content and share it with others who access these sites

Ø  e.g. blogs, forums, photo, video-sharing sites, wiki, podcasts.

Ø  Key social networking sites, e.g. Facebook, Twitter

Ø  Virtual worlds: e.g. Second life

Ø  Product review site

Ø  Mobile apps and geospatial platforms: Digital applications that integrate sophisticated GPS technology to enable users to alert friends of their exact whereabouts via their mobile phones

Steps to Develop the Promotional Plan

The Hierarchy of Effects

Step 3: Determine and allocate the marketing communication budget

• Determine the total promotion budget via one of the following:

Ø  Top-down budgeting techniques

Ø  Bottom-up budgeting techniques

• Decide on a push or pull strategy

Ø  Push strategy

Ø  Pull strategy

• Allocate spending to specific promotion activities

Step 4: Design the promotion mix

• Involves determining the:

Ø  Specific promotional tools to be used

Ø  Message to be communicated

Ø  Communication channel

• Message communication goals:

Ø  Attention, interest, desire, and action (AIDA model)

Step 5: Evaluate the effectiveness of the communication program

•       Whether or not the communication objectives have been adequately translated into marketing communication messages that effectively reached the correct target market?

•       Some objectives are easier to assess than are others