PROMOTION (MARKETING MIX)


PROMOTION

 Promotion stands for activities that communicate the merits of the product and persuade target consumers to buy it. Strategies are needed to combine individual methods such as advertising, personal selling, and sales promotion into a coordinated campaign. In addition promotional strategies must be adjusted as a product move from an earlier stage from a later stage of its life.

Modern marketing is highly promotional oriented. Organizations strive to push their sales and market standing on a sustained basis and in a profitable manner under conditions of complex direct and indirect competitive situations. Promotion also acts as an impetus to marketing. It is simultaneously a communication, persuasion and conditioning process. There are at least four major direct promotional methods or tools – personal selling, advertising, publicity and sales promotion. They are briefly explained as follows:

(i) Personal selling: Personal selling is one of the oldest forms of promotion. It involves face-to-face interaction of sales force with the prospective customers and provides a high degree of personal attention to them. In personal selling, oral communication is made with potential buyers of a product with the intention of making a sale. It may initially focus on developing a relationship with the potential buyer, but end up with efforts for making a sale. Personal selling suffers from a very high costs as sales personnel are expensive. They can physically attend only one customer at a time. Thus it is not a cost-effective way of reaching a large number of people. However, as it is a highly effective method to persuade a potential customer into making a purchase, the personal selling is used in all kind of industries for all products.

(ii) Advertising: Advertising is a non-personal, highly flexible and dynamic promotional method. The media for advertising includes pamphlets, brochures, newspapers, magazines, hoardings, display boards, radio, television and internet. Choice of appropriate media is important for effectiveness of the message. The media may be local, regional, or national. The type of the message, copy, and illustration are a matter of choice and creativity. Advertising may be directed towards consumers, middlemen or opinion leaders. Advertising is likely to succeed in promoting the sales of an organization but its effectiveness in respect to the expenditure cannot be directly measured. A sale is a function of several variables out of which advertising is only one.

(iii) Publicity: Publicity is also a non-personal form of promotion similar to advertising. However, no payments are made to the media as in case of advertising. Organizations skilfully seek to promote themselves and their products without payment. Publicity is communication of a product, brand or business by placing information about it in the media without paying for the time or media space directly. Thus, it is way of reaching customers with negligible cost. Basic tools for publicity are press releases, press conferences, reports, stories, and internet releases. These releases must be of interest to the public.

(iv) Sales promotion: Sales promotion is an omnibus term that includes all activities that are undertaken to promote the business but are not specifically included under personal selling, advertising or publicity. Activities like discounts, contests, money refunds, instalments, kiosks, exhibitions and fairs constitute sales promotion. All these are meant to give a boost to the sales. Sales promotion done periodically may help in getting a larger market share to an organization.

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