Promotion

Promotion is one of the marketing mix tools. Promotion is communication. It is important for any company to promote its product carefully in the target market because a customer only gets to know about the company's product through promotion.

i Purpose and Elements of Promotion

To sell the product successfully the target group should have knowledge about the existence and availability of the product in the market. This is achieved through promotion. There are two reasons for promotion:

•  To inform the customers about the products and services offered by the company
•  To encourage the customers to buy the product and services

Promotion includes the following:

• Advertising
•  Sales promotion
•  Direct marketing
• Public relations
• Personal selling

Elements of Promotion

ii. Promotion Process and Communication:

The promotion processes includes:

a. Advertising

•  Public presentations
•  Print and TV advertisement
•  Expressive advertisements to gain the customers attention easily

b. Sales Promotion: the various sales promotion tools are contests, coupons,premiums, various offers like buy 1 get one free etc. Sales promotion tools easily gain attention of the customer by providing value and instant buying trigger.

c. Personal Selling: Personal selling is one of the most effective tools of promotion.Personal selling helps a customer to build the trust on the product because a customer is able to observe the product closely. Attending exhibitions is also one of the examples of personal selling.

d. Direct Marketing: It involves direct mail, internet marketing, and telemarketing.

The advantages of direct marketing are:

• A message can be prepared quickly and addressed to a specific target
• person.
• We can change the message according to the person's response and can appeal to the addressed person.

e. Public Relations and Publicity: It involves other ways of promoting the product in the market e.g. providing knowledge to the customer through some article or by telling new features instead of giving information through print or media ads.It helps in case of those customers who do not want to interact with salespeople.

iii. Promotional Campaigns: Now a days marketers use all promotion tools together to promote the product. The factors involved in sales promotion are:

•  Size of the incentive to be given to the customers.
•  Conditions for participation.
•  Promotion duration - it should not be either too long or too short.
•  Choosing a distribution method - For example, discounts coupons can be given to the customer through various methods like newspaper, mail, in malls,or in some stores etc.
•  Time of promoting a product - For example annual or biannual promotions.
•  Total sales-promotion budget - Cost to promote a product consists of administrative cost (market research and analysis, planning, promotion, and channel management cost), and incentive cost (cost of providing offers to the customers) multiplied by the expected number of deals to be sold.
• For example, your total administrative cost/unit is Rs. X, Incentive cost/unit is Rs. Y, and you expect to sell 100 units. Then, the total sales promotion budget would come to (X+Y)*100.