Mastering the Promotion Mix: Strategies for Effective Marketing

Understanding the Promotion Mix

The promotion mix is the specific blend of promotion tools that a company uses to persuasively communicate customer value and build customer relationships.

Core Promotion Tools

• Advertising: Any paid form of nonpersonal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods, or services by an identified sponsor.
• Sales Promotion: Short-term incentives to encourage the purchase or sale of a product or service.
• Personal Selling: Personal presentation by the firm’s sales force for the purpose of making sales and building customer relationships.
• Public Relations (PR): Building good relations with the company’s various publics by obtaining favorable publicity, building up a good corporate image, and handling or heading off unfavorable rumors, stories, and events.
• Direct Marketing: Direct connections with carefully targeted individual consumers to both obtain an immediate response and cultivate lasting customer relationships.

Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC)

Integrated marketing communications (IMC) involves carefully integrating and coordinating the company’s many communications channels to deliver a clear, consistent, and compelling message about the organization and its products.

Steps in Developing Effective Marketing Communication

1. Identifying the Target Audience
2. Determining the Communication Objectives
3. Designing a Message (The message should get attention, hold interest, arouse desire, and obtain action—a framework known as the AIDA model)
4. Choosing Media
5. Selecting the Message Source
6. Collecting Feedback

Communication Channels

• Personal communication channels: Channels through which two or more people communicate directly with each other, including face-to-face, phone, mail, e-mail, or Internet chat.
• Word-of-mouth influence: Personal communications about a product between target buyers and neighbors, friends, family members, and associates.
• Buzz marketing: Cultivating opinion leaders and getting them to spread information about a product or service to others in their communities.
• Nonpersonal communication channels: Media that carry messages without personal contact or feedback, including major media, atmospheres, and events.

Setting the Total Promotion Budget

• Affordable method: Setting the promotion budget at the level management thinks the company can afford.
• Percentage-of-sales method: Setting the promotion budget at a certain percentage of current or forecasted sales or as a percentage of the unit sales price.
• Competitive-parity method: Setting the promotion budget to match competitors’ outlays.
• Objective-and-task method: Developing the promotion budget by (1) defining specific promotion objectives, (2) determining the tasks needed to achieve these objectives, and (3) estimating the costs of performing these tasks. The sum of these costs is the proposed promotion budget.