Core Concepts of Marketing by John Burnett - HTML preview

CHAPTER 8

COMMUNICATING TO MASS MARKETS

for Fort Washington, PA-based CDNow provides consumers with a sample of dynamically

updated content housed on the music retailer's site. When the consumer clicks an arrow on

the ad, it expands to show the top 10 songs in CDNow's top 100 Billboard ChartS

SALES PROMOTION AND PUBLIC RELATIONS

For several years, sales promotion and public relations have been often misunderstood,

measured, and lnisused by a great many marketers . Unlike advertising and personal sell-

ing that can claim fonnal structures and point

accomplishments, sales promotion

and PR have neither. Although this situation is changing somewhat, there is still a great

deal of room for improvement. In the case of sales promotion, there exists some confusion

as to which activities actually fall under this heading. Are packaging, couponing, and point-

of-purchase displays all sales promotion? Because the answer to this question varies from

organization to organization and across situations, sales promotion is often viewed

a catch-

all category that includes everything that an organization does not label advertising or pub-

lic relations .

Public relations, too, is difficult to define as it deals with the ultimate intangible-

creating a positive image of the company. Not only is this difficult to accomplish, but it is

also virtually impossible to ascertain if you have succeeded and to what extent. An organ-

ization, for instance, might sponsor a free barbecue for a Fourth of July celebration and

never really know if the money spent produced additional business. Management has a dif-

ficult time appreciating an activity that produces indirect results.

Sales Promotion: A Little Bit of Everything

As the newest member of the promotional team, sales promotion has sllffered from a seri-

ous identity crisis. For example, initially the American Marketing Association defines sales

promotion as , "marketing activities, other than personal selling, advertising, and publicity, that stimulate consumer purchasing and dealer effectiveness, such as displays, shows and

exhibitions, demonstrations, and various non-recurrent selling efforts not in the ordinary

routine ."6 In the AMA view, sales promotion supplements both personal selling and adver-

tising, coordinates

and helps make them more effective.6However, this does not pro-

vide an accurate portrayal of the role played by sales promotion. A

way of viewing

sales promotion is to say that it means special offers: special in the sense that they are extra as well as specific in time or place; offers in the sense that they are direct propositions,

acceptance of which fonns a

Simply, it increases the perceived value of the product.

As in most aspects of marketing, the rationale of sales promotion is to provide a direct

stimulus to produce a desired response by customers . It is not always clear, however, what

the distinctions are between sales promotion and advertising, personal selli ng and public

relations. For example, suppose that Pillsbury decides to tape three cans of their buttennilk

canned biscuits together and sell them for a price slightly cheaper than the three sold indi-

vidually. Is that a branded multipack special offer and therefore promotional? Or is it just

an example of a giant-sized economy pack, and therefore a product or packaging tactic? In

order to sort out which it is, the question has to be asked, is it intended to be a permanent

feature of the manufacturer's product policy

have the family

as a compor:ent of the

product? If it is not, it is a sales promotion scheme.

The same sort of problem comes up when studying strategies run by firms in serv-

ice industries. If a hotel offers cut-price accommodations

off-peak times of the year, is

it a feature of the hotel management's pricing policy or is it a promotional tactic? If the

SALES PROMOTION AND PUBLIC RELATIONS

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Here's an excellent example of a sales promotion .

hotel management provides price reductions on tickets to local theaters for their guests, is

it part of the product or is it a device to attract customers for a limited period only? Again,

answer can only be given once the quesiion about performance is asked . Even then,

there still lend to be elements of advertising, personal selling, public relations and sales

promotion in many promotional vehicles, and this may be the right approach. A candy

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