Promotion and Presentation:
Promotion is an important component of the marketing mix. Promotional approaches include advertising, direct marketing, sales promotions, public relations and publicity, personal selling, and sponsorship. The design of appropriate communication strategies involves a number of considerations. First decisions need to be made about what is to be achieved. This includes consideration of the target audience, communication objectives and the marketing message. Next, factors associated with the “how” need attention. This involves the selection of communication channels, budget setting and the design of the promotional mix. Finally, it is necessary to measure the outcome of promotional endeavors in order to establish whether the investment in promotion has been worthwhile (Rowley, 1998).
Promotion is all about marketing mix, which is type of communication with consumer. Promotion may include conducting advertising, sales promotion, publicity and personal selling. Advertising is non-personal presentation of information in mass media about a product, brand company or store. It greatly influences the consumer’s perception, beliefs, attitudes, toward product and brand and that may in turn change the consumer buying behavior (Lovelock, 2010).
According to Clow (2010), promotion is an important element of marketing strategy. It is used as communicate with customers with respect to product offering, and it is an effective tool to encourage customers to purchase of product and services.
Promotion is used by organizations to communicate with customers with respect to their product offerings. In this sense, promotion is one side of the communication process with customers. Market research, in which suppliers seek to elicit information on consumer requirements from consumers, is the complementary component of the communication process. In some forms of promotion and service delivery, communication in both directions can be achieved simultaneously, and since two-way communication is the only real form of communication, promotion which is associated with two-way communication is to be encouraged. Examples of such two-way promotion emerge largely from the contexts of services marketing and relationship marketing. In services marketing, for example, promotion can be part of the service delivery.
Exchanges between the service agent and the customer can elicit information about customer requirements, and also permit the service agent to explain the organization’s products and how these might meet the customer’s needs. Similar kinds of exchanges can occur in the relationship marketing interest in business-to-business marketing transactions where the sales person is a significant agent in the establishment of relationships between customer and the organization. A more formularized approach, the use of loyalty and reward cards, in, say, supermarkets, offers another approach which embeds both promotional and market research activities. An appropriate promotional mix must be created in order to meet the promotional objectives of any given promotion strategy. The promotional mix is the combination of different promotional channels that is used to communicate a promotional message. This will involve an appropriate selection from the range of tools that are available for use as part of the promotional mix. The tools in the promotional mix include:
