Part 4 of 4: “Promotion”
We conclude this four-part series by exploring various promotional or branding concepts within the marketing mix.
Promotion includes advertising, sales promotion, education, publicity and personal selling. It means taking the research of your target market and directing the product, price and distribution plans into a format that will capture someone’s attention.
In the context of the marketing mix, the promotion represents the three other aspects of communicating information about the product or service with the goal of generating a positive “buzz” or customer response. Decisions and tactics made on how a product or service is promoted may be directed individually or you may chose to combine multiple strategies or cross-promotions. Two decades ago the shotgun approach or “spray and pray” method as it was called, worked very well; the idea of taking aim at several target markets, using the same marketing strategy for all of them was profitable. However, economics have changed the marketing playing field rapidly and advertising is among the first line items cut from a budget to reduce costs. This means research of your target market and carefully planning your promotional agenda is critical before executing any type of marketing campaign.
Here are a few of the more popular marketing communication strategies:
• Personal selling and utilizing a sales force, including inside sales and customer service
• Advertising through traditional and non-traditional media
• Cross-promotions with a strategic supplier partner
• Trending by demographics
• Creative packaging
• Product bundling
• Sales promotions
• Public relations
• Product tie-in
One of the most talked about examples of successful marketing in pop-culture is the story of E.T. and Reese’s Pieces candy. It is a fact that Stephen Spielberg had first asked Mars M&M’s to use their famous name brand, but was turned down for unconfirmed reasons. He then went to Hershey’s and requested the use of Reese’s Pieces. They saw the potential and stepped up and donated their candy along with a million-dollar cross-promotional tie-in at the same time the movie opened in 1982. Wall Street saw Hershey’s stock rise 85% in less than two weeks. In the same amount of time, shares of Mars M&M’s dropped 65% in value.
The concept of “Social Media Publicity” started taking off with the rise of e-mail followed by internet chat rooms. Here’s another example of a unique marketing strategy that produced triple-digit ROI:
In 1999, “The Blair Witch Project” was released. This independent movie, produced in nine days for less than $150,000 was promoted through a carefully constructed teaser campaign which primarily consisted of internet messages targeted at mid-teens and young-adults eight months before the movie was released. The massive buzz that the chat room campaign created resulted in the movie making $248,639,099 worldwide.
Promotions go beyond movies, radio and newspapers. Media advertising, trade show and direct-mail businesses are billion-dollar industries each, where companies vie for the attention of buyers in every way possible. Does that mean using flashier graphics or fancier gimmicks will sell more product than your competitor? No, because sometimes the simplest approach is the more successful one.
On the same note, marketing experts will also tell you that, given enough time, what goes around will come back around again and “Retro” will never go out of style. Sometimes you have to use what resources are available. Plan ahead, research, hire an outside consultant if needed, ask the unasked questions, listen to the response then revise. Once your plans are executed then follow up, ask more questions, learn from risks that were taken then start the process over.
When it’s done right, promotions can make profits soar.
"It used to be way back in the stone age of 2004 that the digital person would simply say, 'We've got lots of online buzz,' and you just never knew what that meant.” - Christine Birch
Experts say the next generation of consumers are moving faster, thinking faster and making decisions more rapidly than their parents did. In addition, they are taking more educated risks and looking for eye-catching trends outside the mainstream. Tomorrow’s generation of successful promoters will use the influence of instantly streaming information to network information and communicate via text messaging and social media sites beyond the current sites like Blogger and Twitter.
Industry executives are finding it's important to track the instant reactions to their new offerings, and companies are springing up to provide tools that both monitor and analyze buzz on social networking sites. Buzz is the amount of chatter or interest in a product or service, which can increase awareness and help drive sales.
The forecast is manufacturers will increasingly rely on Blogger, Twitter, Facebook or similar online social networking feeds to gauge the popular buzz on products before they come out, in a move reflecting the transition of power a new generation of purchasing directors will have over once-popular focus groups or detailed surveys.
“The writing is on the wall much quicker than ever before,” said Pete Blackshaw, executive VP of Nielsen Online - Digital Strategic Services. “If you know the dog's not going to hunt, at what point do you start to get more efficient and say, we're not going to spend everything, maybe we save the marketing budget for something else.”
If industrial distribution trends persist, based on recent months, the growing influence of online word-of-mouth will impact a world where a Twitter comment can help break or make a marketing promotion plan. Tools are being developed like TrendRR and Fizziology to measure online buzz, valuable research which will strongly impact the future decisions of corporate marketing directors.
"What's really cool about this is the fact that we're not only listening in to the chatter but we’re tracking what’s being said; and our clients are paying attention," said Ben Carlson, co-creator of Fizziology. A creation of advertising firm Bradley and Montgomery, Fizziology creates weekly charts showing what consumers are talking.
Christine Birch, president of marketing at DreamWorks Studios, "It used to be way back in the stone age of 2004 that the digital person would simply say, 'We've got lots of online buzz,' and you just never knew what that meant.”
Some experts say this is the future of market research.
If you’re not already beginning to apply social networking media strategies to your business plan, within a short time you might very well be invisible to the next generation of purchasing managers. The key is to learn about your market and what efforts you can make to bring the most profit from a particular target. Going too far you may risk losing your core buying audience; not doing enough runs that potential risk too.
Like each of the other three P’s in this series, marketing is a science and in addition to product, price, place and promotion it also takes research, patience, planning and risk. If you remember one thing from this series, the success of any product or service depends on the abilities of the production team, the pricing manager, the distribution channel and the promotional efforts all working together, efficiently and effectively.
Sources: Alex Dobuzinskis, Reuters News Services and www.marketingmix.net
Todd Guenther, October 16, 2009
For more information about SMS, visit http://www.growwithsms.com/ or email info@growwithsms.com.
We conclude this four-part series by exploring various promotional or branding concepts within the marketing mix.
Promotion includes advertising, sales promotion, education, publicity and personal selling. It means taking the research of your target market and directing the product, price and distribution plans into a format that will capture someone’s attention.
In the context of the marketing mix, the promotion represents the three other aspects of communicating information about the product or service with the goal of generating a positive “buzz” or customer response. Decisions and tactics made on how a product or service is promoted may be directed individually or you may chose to combine multiple strategies or cross-promotions. Two decades ago the shotgun approach or “spray and pray” method as it was called, worked very well; the idea of taking aim at several target markets, using the same marketing strategy for all of them was profitable. However, economics have changed the marketing playing field rapidly and advertising is among the first line items cut from a budget to reduce costs. This means research of your target market and carefully planning your promotional agenda is critical before executing any type of marketing campaign.
Here are a few of the more popular marketing communication strategies:
• Personal selling and utilizing a sales force, including inside sales and customer service
• Advertising through traditional and non-traditional media
• Cross-promotions with a strategic supplier partner
• Trending by demographics
• Creative packaging
• Product bundling
• Sales promotions
• Public relations
• Product tie-in
One of the most talked about examples of successful marketing in pop-culture is the story of E.T. and Reese’s Pieces candy. It is a fact that Stephen Spielberg had first asked Mars M&M’s to use their famous name brand, but was turned down for unconfirmed reasons. He then went to Hershey’s and requested the use of Reese’s Pieces. They saw the potential and stepped up and donated their candy along with a million-dollar cross-promotional tie-in at the same time the movie opened in 1982. Wall Street saw Hershey’s stock rise 85% in less than two weeks. In the same amount of time, shares of Mars M&M’s dropped 65% in value.
The concept of “Social Media Publicity” started taking off with the rise of e-mail followed by internet chat rooms. Here’s another example of a unique marketing strategy that produced triple-digit ROI:
In 1999, “The Blair Witch Project” was released. This independent movie, produced in nine days for less than $150,000 was promoted through a carefully constructed teaser campaign which primarily consisted of internet messages targeted at mid-teens and young-adults eight months before the movie was released. The massive buzz that the chat room campaign created resulted in the movie making $248,639,099 worldwide.
Promotions go beyond movies, radio and newspapers. Media advertising, trade show and direct-mail businesses are billion-dollar industries each, where companies vie for the attention of buyers in every way possible. Does that mean using flashier graphics or fancier gimmicks will sell more product than your competitor? No, because sometimes the simplest approach is the more successful one.
On the same note, marketing experts will also tell you that, given enough time, what goes around will come back around again and “Retro” will never go out of style. Sometimes you have to use what resources are available. Plan ahead, research, hire an outside consultant if needed, ask the unasked questions, listen to the response then revise. Once your plans are executed then follow up, ask more questions, learn from risks that were taken then start the process over.
When it’s done right, promotions can make profits soar.
"It used to be way back in the stone age of 2004 that the digital person would simply say, 'We've got lots of online buzz,' and you just never knew what that meant.” - Christine Birch
Experts say the next generation of consumers are moving faster, thinking faster and making decisions more rapidly than their parents did. In addition, they are taking more educated risks and looking for eye-catching trends outside the mainstream. Tomorrow’s generation of successful promoters will use the influence of instantly streaming information to network information and communicate via text messaging and social media sites beyond the current sites like Blogger and Twitter.
Industry executives are finding it's important to track the instant reactions to their new offerings, and companies are springing up to provide tools that both monitor and analyze buzz on social networking sites. Buzz is the amount of chatter or interest in a product or service, which can increase awareness and help drive sales.
The forecast is manufacturers will increasingly rely on Blogger, Twitter, Facebook or similar online social networking feeds to gauge the popular buzz on products before they come out, in a move reflecting the transition of power a new generation of purchasing directors will have over once-popular focus groups or detailed surveys.
“The writing is on the wall much quicker than ever before,” said Pete Blackshaw, executive VP of Nielsen Online - Digital Strategic Services. “If you know the dog's not going to hunt, at what point do you start to get more efficient and say, we're not going to spend everything, maybe we save the marketing budget for something else.”
If industrial distribution trends persist, based on recent months, the growing influence of online word-of-mouth will impact a world where a Twitter comment can help break or make a marketing promotion plan. Tools are being developed like TrendRR and Fizziology to measure online buzz, valuable research which will strongly impact the future decisions of corporate marketing directors.
"What's really cool about this is the fact that we're not only listening in to the chatter but we’re tracking what’s being said; and our clients are paying attention," said Ben Carlson, co-creator of Fizziology. A creation of advertising firm Bradley and Montgomery, Fizziology creates weekly charts showing what consumers are talking.
Christine Birch, president of marketing at DreamWorks Studios, "It used to be way back in the stone age of 2004 that the digital person would simply say, 'We've got lots of online buzz,' and you just never knew what that meant.”
Some experts say this is the future of market research.
If you’re not already beginning to apply social networking media strategies to your business plan, within a short time you might very well be invisible to the next generation of purchasing managers. The key is to learn about your market and what efforts you can make to bring the most profit from a particular target. Going too far you may risk losing your core buying audience; not doing enough runs that potential risk too.
Like each of the other three P’s in this series, marketing is a science and in addition to product, price, place and promotion it also takes research, patience, planning and risk. If you remember one thing from this series, the success of any product or service depends on the abilities of the production team, the pricing manager, the distribution channel and the promotional efforts all working together, efficiently and effectively.
Sources: Alex Dobuzinskis, Reuters News Services and www.marketingmix.net
Todd Guenther, October 16, 2009
For more information about SMS, visit http://www.growwithsms.com/ or email info@growwithsms.com.
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