The communication of positive, persuasive information about an organization or its products with the intent of directly or indirectly influencing exchanges is called promotion.
Promotional messages can inform consumers about organizations and influence them to make a purchase or adopt special cause or belief. I will discuss-
The role of promotion
Promotional objectives
Promotion mix
Types of advertising
Advertising media and campaign planning
Publicity
The role of promotion:
The fourth element in the marketing mix, promotion supports product, pricing, and distribution decisions. It is crucial to the success of any firm. Before deciding what type of promotional program to conduct, a firm needs to establish its objectives.
Promotional objectives:
Firms set promotional objectives that will help met their broader marketing and organizational objectives. Promotional program can be built around a single objective or multiple objectives. Main objectives are below:
Informing: The basic objective underlying all promotion is providing information. Firms want to tell potential customers about themselves as well as what products are available, where they can be purchased, and for what price.
Increasing Sales: Aside from providing information, encouraging prospective customers to purchase products is the most common promotional objective, since sales man survival and success for firms.
Stabilizing Sales: Firm’s also rely on promotional activities to reduce or eliminate substantial variations in demand throughout the year. Companies marketing seasonal products may step up promotional efforts during slow times of the year to use production facilities and distribution systems most effectively.
Positioning the Product: Often a firm uses promotion to position a product as different or superior to competing products. Positioning means emphasizing certain product features to create a specific image for the product and add to its appeal.
Building a Public Image: Sometimes a company wants to develop a certain image through promotion.
The Promotion Mix:
To inform, influence, and remind customers in their target market, or the general public, firms use personal selling and advertising, sales promotion, and publicity. How these four elements are combined to promote a specific product is called the promotion mix.
Advertising:
Advertising is a paid form of non-personal communication to a target audience through a mass medium such as television, newspaper, and magazines.
Types of Advertising:
An advertiser can use any types of advertising. It’s depending on promotional objectives. Companies advertise is brands, industries advertise products, and firm or individuals advertise themselves. There are three major categories of advertising:
- Primary demand
- Selective (brand)
- Institutional
Primary Demand Advertising: The organizations want to create or increase demand for all products in a product group. In this case, they use primary demand advertising.
Selective Advertising: A firm wants to create selective demand, or demand for a specific brand of product rather than for other, competing products. Selective (brand) advertising makes up the majority of advertising, marketers of virtually all goods and services use it in their promotion mixes. Sometimes a firm compares its brand of product to another in advertisements.
Institutional Advertising: This advertising used for, when an organization primarily to build goodwill and create a favorable public image, it employs institutional advertising.
Advertising Media:
Advertising media is outlets, including television, newspaper, radio, magazine, and outdoor displays etc. Often the company spent more dollars for each medium.
Newspaper is the largest category of the advertising media. Spending for newspaper advertising exceeds $30 billion each year. Firms can advertise in newspaper distributed locally, nationally, or internationally.
Television is another large medium. Television is greatest advantage is that, it allows creative use of action, color, and sound, that not possible in any other medium. Television advertising is high costing advertising.
Developing Advertising Campaigns:
A firm’s go to design, creates, and evaluate advertisements that will accomplish their promotional goals. The firm generally must take these steps, to develop an effective advertising campaign.
- Identify the target audience
- State the objectives to be accomplished.
- Determine how much money to spend
- Develop an advertising platform consisting of the points
- Outline a media plan, indicating specific media in which advertisements will be run.
- Create advertisement
- Place the advertisements to the media
- Evaluate the effectiveness of the ads.
