I am back at the Marketing series of articles yet again. Yet this time the articles focus a little more on the advertising spectrum of marketing beginning with Promotion.
Promotion is simply defined as marketing communication to the customer and it can be done in a variety of ways. The first is personal selling which I’m confident we’re all familiar with when we go to the store and have a face to face conversation with the sales rep of such store and are being sold such product. The second is mass selling which is non personal and towards a mass audience – think TV commercial. The third is advertising which can also be considered a TV commercial but more-so focuses on the aspect of the marketing being paid for by an identified sponsor – like the companies who sponsor Nascar drivers. The fourth and last method of marketing is publicity. Publicity isn’t paid for but is newsworthy. There are of course positives and negatives of publicity and it could be more beneficial than advertisement due to unbiased belief but more often than not – there is no such thing as bad publicity.
The objective of publicity is to create a good attitude toward your product. As I mentioned in a previous article, attitude specifies tolerance or preference to the consumer buying behavior process as motivation influences a customer’s action to purchase. Marketing can change attitudes by informing, persuading, and reminding. Informing builds primary demand for the product by educating the consumer. Persuading builds selective demand between competing recognized products. Reminding connects those who already have a favorable attitude toward the product. Attitudes however, are measurable within a fixed time restraint. An acronym that you should keep in mind is DAGMAR which stands for Determine Advertising Goals so you can Measure Advertising Results. For example, marketers can set a persuasion objective like to obtain 5% market share within six months time.
As I mentioned in the beginning, promotion is defined as marketing communication but let me explain what that really means. In the communication process someone must always initiate the communication between the source which is the marketer and the receiver which is the target market. When we communicate our message as the source is then encoded through our language and channeled into some sort of media whether it is vocal, written, etc. The message then gets decoded by the receiver which can be a single customer or an entire market. This theory of marketing communication explains why marketers must sometimes speak slower and more concisely so that the message they are trying to convey to the customer is received. Sales people who speak too fast or who incorporate too much jargon can lose their customer in the conversation because the message isn’t successfully decoded.
I will continue breaking down the promotion aspect of marketing further in the next article.
