PROMOTION

Promotion refers to corporate communication that uses various methods to reach a targeted
audience with a certain message in order to achieve specific organizational objectives. People’s
attitudes towards promotion vary. Some hold that promotional activities particularly advertising
and personal selling, paint a distorted picture of reality because they provide the customer with
only selected information. According to this view, the repetition of similar themes in promotion
has brought about changes in social values, such as increased materialism.
However, the role of promotion in a company is to communicate with individuals, groups or
organizations with the aim of directly or indirectly facilitating exchanges by informing and
persuading one or more of the audiences to accept the firm’s products.

Objectives /Roles of promotion

To Build Awareness – New products and new companies are often unknown to a market,
To Create Interest – Customers must first recognize they have a need before they actively start
to consider a purchase.
To Inform -Management may need to make their audience aware that their product exists, and to
explain exactly what it does. This is a particularly important objective for new products
To Persuade -seek to persuade customers that their brand has benefits that are superior to
competitors
To Stimulate Demand – the promotional efforts may be directed at getting the customer to try
the product.
To Reinforce the Brand /Image creation– Sometimes, promoting a brand image is the only
way to create differentiation in the mind of the consumer (e.g. lager advertising)
To reassure customers: reassuring customers that they have made the right choice and
encouraging them to stay loyal to a brand.

THE COMUNICATION PROCESS & ELEMENTS IN THE COMMUNICATION PROCESS

Media Decoding Receiver

Sender Encoding
Message

NOISE

Feedback Response

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Elements in the communication process
The sender: The party sending the message to another party.
Encoding- process of conveying the intended message. The process of putting thought into
symbolic form e.g. McDonald's Advertising agency assembles words, sounds, and illustrations
into an advert to convey the intended message.
Message- Set of symbols that the sender transmits-Actual advert.
Media –The communication channel through which the message moves from the sender to
receiver e.g. television. Radio etc and the specific program.
Decoding-The process by which the receiver assigns meaning to the symbols encoded by the
sender. (Convert message into thought) e.g. Watch advert and interpret the words and images it
contains.
Receiver - The party receiving the message sent by another party e.g. the customer watching the
ad.
Response- The reaction of the receiver after being exposed to the message e.g. I’m loving it or
does nothing.
Feedback- The part of the receiver‘s response communicated back to the sender.
Noise- Unplanned static or distortion during the communication process that results in a receiver
getting a different message than the one the sender sent.

N.B: Key factors in good communication are;

 Senders need to know what audience they wish to reach and what response they want.
 They must be good at encoding messages that take into account how the target audience
decodes them.
 They must send messages through media that reach target audience
 must develop feedback channels so that that can access the audience’s response to the
message

Promotion Mix strategies

Push strategy is directing the promotional mix to channel members to gain their cooperation in
ordering and stocking the product. In this approach, personal selling and sales promotions play
major roles. Salespeople call on wholesalers to encourage orders and provide sales assistance.
Sales promotions, such as case discount allowances, are offered to stimulate demand. By pushing
the product through the channel, the goal is to get channel members to push it to their customers.

Pull strategy is when a manufacturer directs its efforts in the form of advertising and sales
promotions to ultimate consumers to encourage them to ask the retailer for the product. Seeing
demand from ultimate consumers, retailers order the product from wholesalers and thus the item
is pulled through the channel are also important.

Profile/integrated strategy- involves a combination of the two

PROMOTION MIX TOOLS/ ELEMENTS

These are set of tools/elements that a business can use to communicate effectively the benefits of
its products or services to its customers.

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People’s attitudes towards promotion vary. Some hold that promotional activities particularly
advertising and personal selling, paint a distorted picture of reality because they provide the
customer with only selected information. According to this view, the repetition of similar themes
in promotion has brought about changes in social values, such as increased materialism.
However, the role of promotion in a company is to communicate with individuals, groups or
organizations with the aim of directly or indirectly facilitating exchanges by informing and
persuading one or more of the audiences to accept the firm’s products.
When an organization combines specific ingredients to promote a particular product, that
combination constitutes the promotional mix for that product. The four traditional ingredients of
a promotional mix are advertising, personal selling, public relations and sales promotion.
Increasingly, sponsorship and direct mail elements of the promotional mix in their own right.

Advertising: Advertising is a paid form of non-personal communication about an organization

and its products that is transmitted to a target audience through a mass medium such as
television, radio, newspapers, magazines, direct mail, public transport, outdoor displays or
catalogues.
Individuals and organizations use advertising to promote goods, services, ideas, issues and
people.

Some of the benefits of advertising include;

Because it is highly flexible, advertising offers the option of reaching an extremely large target
audience or focusing on a small, precisely defined segment of the population.

It can be extremely cost efficient promotional method because it reaches a vast number of people
at a low cost per person.

Personal Selling: Personal selling involves informing customers and persuading them to
purchase products through personal communication in an exchange situation. Personal selling
has both advantages and limitations when compared with advertising. Advertising is general
communication aimed at a relatively large target audience, whereas personal selling involves
more specific communication aimed at one or several persons.
Reaching one person through personal selling efforts often have a greater impact on customers.
Personal selling also provides immediate feedback, which allows marketers to adjust their
message to improve communication.

Publicity and Public Relations: Publicity refers to non-personal communication in news story
form about an organization or its products, or both, that is transmitted through a mass medium at
no charge. Examples of publicity include magazine, newspaper, radio and television news stories
about new retail stores, and new products or personnel changes in an organization.
Publicity must be planned and implemented so that it is compatible with and supportive of other
elements in the promotional mix. However, publicity cannot be controlled to the extent that other
elements of the promotional mix can be.

Sales Promotion: Sales promotion is an activity or material that acts as a direct inducement by
offering added value to or incentive for the product to resellers, salespeople or consumers.

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Examples of sales promotion include coupons and tokens, bonuses and contests used to enhance
the sales of a product. The term sales promotion should not be confused with promotion; sales
promotion is but a part of the more comprehensive area of promotion, encompassing personal
selling, advertising, publicity, sponsorship and direct mail.
Marketers frequently rely on sales promotion to improve the effectiveness of other promotional
mix ingredients, especially advertising and personal selling. They also design sales promotion to
produce immediate, short run sales increases. Generally, if a company employs advertising or
personal selling, it either depends on them continuously or turns to them cyclically. However, a
marketer’s use of sales promotion tends to be irregular.

Sponsorship: Sponsorship is the financial or material support of an event, activity, person,

organization or product by an unrelated organization or donor. Funds are made available to the
recipient of the sponsorship in return for the prominent exposure of the benefactor’s generosity,
products and brands. Sponsorship is no longer confined to the arts or the sporting world,
although many galleries, theatrical companies, sports events and teams could not survive without
sponsorship. Research and development, buildings, degree courses, charitable events – all often
benefit from sponsorship. The donor or sponsor gains the benefits of enhanced company, brand
or individual reputation and awareness, as well as possibly improved morale and employee
relations.

Direct Marketing: Direct mail is used to entice prospective customers or charitable donors
directly to invest in products, services or worthy causes. Through Europe, direct mail is used as a
pre-sell technique prior to a sales call, to generate orders, qualify prospects for a sales call,
follow up a sale, announce special or localized sales, and raise funds for charities and non-profit
organizations. Good database management is essential, and the material must be carefully
targeted to overcome the growing public aversion to “junk mail”

NB: Research the advantages and disadvantages of each promotion mix element.

Factors to consider in Selection of a promotional method

 Promotional Objective
 Availability of Resources
 Type of Target Market such as size, location affect how the marketer communicates
with customers for example when they are widely dispersed.
 Type of Product e.g. convenience products verses higher-end specialty goods, unsought
for goods.