Promotional Practices In Business

Promotion is defined as “The marketing function concerned with persuasively communicating to target audiences the contents of the marketing programme in order to facilitate exchange between the marketer and the consumer and to help them to satisfy the objectives of both”.

Promotion is one of the key aspects of the marketing mix (the other three elements are Product, Price, and Place). However, according to Neil. H. Borden’s Marketing Mix; Marketing Communications has its own “promotional mix”, which includes advertising, public relations, personal selling, publicity, direct mail, internet, sponsorship, trade fairs and exhibitions.

Thus, the company needs to effectively utilise all its promotional mix in a manner that a strength of one is use to offset the weakness of other to achieve its organisational goals and objectives, this can be done through appropriate promotional strategy/plan.

Advertising is a from of non-personal, mass communication with the public; Sales Promotion involves the use of special short-term techniques to boost the sales of the company; Public Relations is formally defined as, any form of non-paid commercial significant news or editorial comment about ideas, products and institutions; Publicity is done by the company to enhance its image in the eyes of various social groups; Direct Mail is a focused form of communication with the target audiences through Internet;

The purpose of the Trade Fairs and Exhibitions is to increase the awareness of the product, encourage trial, create new customers and retain the existing ones; whereas, when an organisation associates itself with an event, a cause, a programme to enhance its goodwill is known as Sponsorship.

There are different methods of allocating promotional budget like arbitrary method (where budget is decided by the top management) , percentage of sales method (the company allocates sales budget on the current/anticipated sales or the sales price), unit percentage method (the budget is set for each product/ brand after detailed cost analysis), competitive parity method (the budget is based on the competitors expenses), objective and task method (the budget is determined by the organisational objectives, task and the estimated cost) as well as composite method (all techniques mentioned above are used to derive the promotional budget).

The objective of Promotion is to build awareness, create interest, provide information, boost demand, create brand awareness, brand loyalty and preferences. It can be for the dealer, reseller, salesmen or the consumer/buyer.

Promotions in books are divided into 2 main categories namely Below the Line and Above the Line Promotion.

1. Below the Line: - It includes in-house offers like vouchers, schemes, loyalty card offers, sponsorship, direct mails, personal selling and public relations.

2. Above the Line: - This method includes promotion in press, television, radio, cinema, posters, billboards, internet etc. Whereas, Mid Line Promotion is for the internal staff and employees of the organisation.

Hence, Promotion is rightly defined as “communicating with the public in an attempt to influence them towards buying your products and services.