Marketing Promotion and Communication Fundamentals

Core Concepts of Marketing Promotion

Promotion: communicating information between seller and potential buyer or others in the channel to influence attitudes and behavior.

Primary Methods of Selling

• Personal selling: direct spoken communication between sellers and potential customers, usually in person but sometimes over the telephone.
• Mass selling: communicating with large numbers of potential customers at the same time.
• Advertising: any paid form of non-personal presentation of ideas, goods, or services by an identified sponsor.
• Publicity: any unpaid form of non-personal presentation of ideas, goods, or services.
• Sales promotion: those promotion activities—other than advertising, publicity, and personal selling—that stimulate interest, trial, or purchase by final customers or others in the channel.

Key Management Roles

• Sales managers: managers concerned with managing personal selling.
• Advertising managers: managers of their company's mass selling effort in television, newspapers, magazines, and other media.
• Public relations: communication with non-customers—including labor, public interest groups, stockholders, and the government.
• Sales promotion managers: managers of their company's sales promotion effort.

Integrated Marketing and the AIDA Model

Integrated marketing communications: the intentional coordination of every communication from a firm to a target customer to convey a consistent and complete message.

AIDA model: consists of four promotion jobs—(1) to get Attention, (2) to hold Interest, (3) to arouse Desire, and (4) to obtain Action.

The Communication Process

• Communication process: a source trying to reach a receiver with a message.
• Source: the sender of a message.
• Receiver: the target of a message in the communication process, usually a potential customer.
• Noise: any distraction that reduces the effectiveness of the communication process.
• Encoding: the source in the communication process deciding what it wants to say and translating it into words or symbols that will have the same meaning to the receiver.
• Decoding: the receiver in the communication process translating the message.
• Message channel: the carrier of the message.

Promotion Strategies and the Adoption Curve

• Pushing: using normal promotion effort—personal selling, advertising, and sales promotion—to help sell the whole marketing mix to possible channel members.
• Pulling: using promotion to get consumers to ask intermediaries for the product.
• Adoption curve: shows when different groups accept ideas.
• Innovators: the first group to adopt new products.