Promotion is a very important component of the Marketing Mix.
No matter how good the product is, how attractive the price is, or how easy it is for people to access it, businesses must market and sell their products using promotion.
When you put your Sainsbury’s shopping in a branded bag, should the business pay you for promoting them?
By using promotion, businesses are actively communicating with consumers what goods and services are available for purchase, and can persuade them to buy it. That is why promotion is crucial for selling products.
‘Advertising is not money down the drain – it is an investment in the future of your brand.’
Definition of promotion
Promotion includes strategies to make the consumer aware of the existence of a product that the business offers.
How many times has a product been promoted to you so far today?
Specifically, promotion refers to methods of communicating messages to the market used to attract customers to buy a firm’s products. In other words, promotion is mainly about communicating with actual customers and potential customers with the intention of selling a firm’s goods and services.
Promotion is also used to inform and remind people of the uses and benefits of a firm’s products raising awareness and publicity. Also, promotional activities are used to differentiate the firm’s products from competitors in the market through branding.
Although promotion is important, especially during the early stages of launching the product to the market, it can be extremely expensive. However, while some forms of promotion are paid for, others are free. And, the third group is being free as the result of many years of initial paid-for promotion.
Why is a banana easier to promote than an apple?
Three different types of promotion
Promotion is usually classified as being Above the Line (ATL), Below the Line (BTL) or Through the Line (TTL).
- Above the Line (ATL) promotion refers to marketing expenditure on advertising in the paid-for independent mass media such as television advertising, radio advertising, cinema advertising, newspapers advertising, magazines advertising, Internet advertising, outdoor advertising, etc.
- Below the Line (BTL) promotion refers to the use of all other non-mass media promotional activities over which the firm has total control including sales promotion, personal selling, direct mail, trade fairs and exhibitions, sponsorship, Public Relations (PR), viral marketing, branding, slogans, logos, packaging, word-of-mouth, direct marketing, etc. These methods are used in the short-term to support Above-the-Line promotion methods.
- Through the Line (TTL) promotion involves combining both Above the Line (ATL) and Below the Line (BTL) promotional strategies.
In reality, most businesses use a combination of both Above the Line (ATL) and Below the Line (BTL) promotion. Determining the optimum promotional budget and forecasting future sales as a result of promotional spending is a challenging task for the marketing manager.
When you drive a car, are you advertising it?
Pull Promotion vs. Push Promotion
In regards to the channel of distribution and how customers are approached, promotion can also be classified as Pull Promotion and Push Promotion.
- Pull Promotion. A Pull Promotion strategy involves promotion of marketing efforts to the final consumer. It tries to make the customer come to the business to buy products by stimulating demand from the end consumer. During communications efforts, customers will be encouraged to seek the product.
- Push Promotion. A Push Promotion strategy involves promotion of marketing efforts to intermediaries in the channel of distribution. The business will communicate to wholesalers, agents and retailers who will stock company’s product and make customers aware of it at the point of purchase.
Does advertising make people buy things they do not need?
Why is promotion an important part of the Marketing Mix?
Integration. Promotion must be integrated properly with each other element of the Marketing Mix – the four elements including Product, Price, Place and Promotion must be linked. Promotion gives the consumer information about the rest of the Marketing Mix. Without promotion consumers would not know about the product, the price it sells for or the place where it is being sold. If a business changes one element of the Marketing Mix, then it impacts all the three other elements. Any updates to product features, reductions in the price of a product or opening a new shop will have to be communicated to the consumer.
Effectiveness & Efficiency. Promotion must be effective – meaning that the pre-established objectives of promotion have been achieved. Promotion must also be efficient – meaning that those objectives were achieved with the lowest cost possible. But, successful promotion is not only about the promotion budget and sales figures. In addition to increasing awareness of products and creating positive brand image that consumers can identify with, effective promotion improves the financial standing of the business and provides sustainable growth in the future.
Packaging. The packaging of a product complements promotional activities of a firm. It is used to influence the imagination of customers to in helping to create the certain image of the product closely tied with product design and technical specifications.
High promotional budgets. Successful promotional campaigns drive sales growth and can increase market share of a business. High growth of promotion spending of many multinational companies rich in cash in recent years confirms the importance of promotion in helping to capture consumer’s attention and create interest, increasing sales by bringing purchases forward, increasing product awareness and creating product image and identity.
In short, the role of promotion is to tell current customers and potential customers about the products persuading them to purchase the good or service.
