Ph. Kotler, G.

Armstrong –Principles of Marketing, Pearson International Edition 2008 and after

Ph. Kotler, K. Keller –Marketing management, Pearson International Edition 2006 and after

XII. Promotion Strategy

1. The Promotion Mix
2. Strategic Alternatives

1. The Promotion Mix

 Promotion mix: specific blend of advertising, sales promotion, public relations,

personal selling and direct marketing tools that are used to communicate customr
value and build customer relationships
 Advertising - any non paid form of nonpersonal presentation and promotion of
ideas, goods or services by an dentified sponsor
 Sales promotion – short-term incentives to encourage the purchase of sale of a
product or service
 Public relations – building good relations with the company’s various publics by
obtaining favourable publicity building up a good corporate image and handling or
heading off unfavourable rumors, stories and events
 Personal selling – personal presentation by by the firms’s sales force for the
purpose of making sales an relationships
 Direct marketing – direct connections with carrefully targeted individual
consumers to both obtain an immediate response and cultivate tasting customer
relationships
 Communiction process – example at HP: sender’s field of experience + receiver’s
field of experience:
- Sender
- Encoding
- Message
- Media
- Decoding
- Receiver
- Response
- Feedback
- noise
Steps in developing effective communication: awareness, knowledge
 , liking, preferences, conviction, purchase
 Choosing media:
- Personal communiction channels – channels through two or more peple
communicate directly with each other, including face to face, phone, mail, e-
mail, chat etc
a. World of mouth influence
b. 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 feeedback, including major media, atmospheres and events

2. Strategic Alternatives

 Push versus promotion strategy

- Push strategy: a promotion strategy that calls for using the sales force and trade
promotion to push the product through channels: producer – retailers and
wholesalers - consumers
- Pull strategy: a promotion strategy that calls for spending a lot on advertising
and consumer promotion to induce final consumers to buy the product: demand
from consumers addressed to retailers and wholesalers, demand from them to
producers
 Advertising – a specific communication task to be accomplished with a specific
target audience during a specific period of time
- Major decisions in advertising
a. Objectives setting (informative, persuasive, reminder)
b. Budget decisions
c. Message decisions
d. Media decisions (television, newspapers, direct mail, magazines, radio,
outdoor, internet)
e. Advertising evaluation
 Public relations
- Press relations or press agency
- Product publicity
- Public afffairs
- Investor relations
- Development
 How their sales people spend their time:
- 10% prospecting
- 14% problem solving
- 17% personal downtime
- 18% travel time
- 31% administration
- 10% active selling
 Direct marketing (direct connections with carefully targeted individual
consumers to get immediate reaction and long lasting relationships:
- Direct mail marketing
- Catalog marketing
- Telephone marketing
- Direct response television marketing
- Kiosk marketing