Promotion Decisions

Those unfamiliar with marketing often assume it is the same thing as advertising.Marketing encompasses many tasks and decisions, of which advertising may only be a small portion.

Additionally, when non-marketers hear someone talk about “promotion” they frequently believe the person is talking about advertising. While advertising is the most visible and best understood method of promotion, it is only one of several approaches a marketer can choose to promote their products and services.

In this tutorial we begin our discussion of the third major area of the marketing mix – promotion.

Many view promotional activities as the most glamorous part of marketing. This may have to do with the fact that promotion is often associated with creative activity undertaken to help distinguish a company’s products from competitors’ offerings. While creativity is an important element in promotion decisions, marketers must also have a deep understanding of how the marketing communication process works and how promotion helps the organization achieve its objectives.

Objectives of Marketing Promotions

The most obvious objective marketers have for promotional activities is to convince customers to make a decision that benefits the marketer (of course the marketer believes the decision will also benefit the customer). For most for-profit marketers this means getting customers to buy an organization’s product and, in most cases, to remain a loyal long-term customer. For other marketers, such as not-for-profits, it means getting customers to increase donations, utilize more services, change attitudes, or change behavior (e.g., stop smoking campaigns).

However, marketers must understand that getting customers to commit to a decision, such as a purchase decision, is only achievable when a customer is ready to make the decision. As we saw in the tutorials covering Consumer Buying Behavior and Business Buying Behavior, customers often move through several stages before a purchase decision is made. Additionally before turning into a repeat customer, purchasers analyze their initial purchase to see whether they received a good value, and then often repeat the purchase process again before deciding to make the same choice.

The type of customer the marketer is attempting to attract and which stage of the purchase process a customer is in will affect the objectives of a particular marketing communication effort. And since a marketer often has multiple simultaneous promotional campaigns, the objective of each could be different.

The Communication Process

The act of communicating has been evaluated extensively for many, many years. One of the classic analyses of communication took place in the 1940s and 1950s when researchers, including Claude Shannon, Warren Weaver, Wilbur Schramm and others, offered models describing how communication takes place.

 In general, communication is how people exchange meaningful information. Models that reflect how communication occurs often include the elements shown below:

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Keys to Effective Communication

For marketers understanding how communication works can improve the delivery of their message. From the information just discussed, marketers should focus on the following to improve communication with their targeted audience:

• Carefully Encode – Marketers should make sure the message they send is crafted in a way that will be interpreted by message receivers as intended. This means having a good understanding of how their audience interprets words, symbols, sounds and other stimuli used by marketers.
• Allow Feedback – Encouraging the message receiver to provide feedback can greatly improve communication and help determine if a marketer’s message was decoded and interpreted properly. Feedback can be improved by providing easy-to-use options for responding, such as phone numbers, Internet chat, and email.
• Reduce Noise – In many promotional situations the marketer has little control over interference with their message. However, there are a few instances where the marketer can proactively lower the noise level. For instance, salespeople can be trained to reduce noise by employing techniques that limit customer distractions, such as scheduling meetings during non-busy times or by inviting potential customers to an environment that offers fewer distractions, such as a conference facility. Additionally, advertising can be developed in ways that separates the marketer’s ad from others, including the use of whitespace in mag