422 The Marketing Book
elsewhere unless they are very determined to
have the information. This seems to be
because the design task is routinely delegated
either to information technology specialists or
to advertising agencies. The former typically
have no background in marketing, with pre-
dictable communication consequences. As for
the latter, a field study in the mid-1990s found
them to be staffed by Luddites (Crosier and
Abbott, 1996). The researchers believe that the
situation has not improved a great deal in the
interim, despite the general rate of uptake of
the new technology. For clients, the solution
may be to switch allegiance to agencies offer-
ing ‘integrated marketing communications’
services, provided those are not simply re-
branding themselves while remaining in fact
single-discipline specialists. Meanwhile, the
initially low price of space on the Internet has
begun to catch up with the prevailing cost of
advertising in other media. For example, a
‘banner ad’ on the Teletext and Double-Click
networks costs, respectively, £30 and £37 per
thousand ‘hits’. The price for one at the
Computer Weekly website is much higher, at
£65 per thousand, and the on-line Financial
Timescharges a flat rate of £2000 per month.
Three years ago, the previous edition of
this chapter came to the conclusion that ‘the
new media are passing through the early stages
of an awareness explosion but have not yet
reached the point at which real understanding
of their commercial application is widespread
among marketing practitioners’. Typical mar-
keting managers will undoubtedly climb fur-
ther up the learning curve during the lifetime of
this edition, but much has yet to be learnt
before the ‘new media’ are as well understood
and effectively used as the ‘old’. Nevertheless,
annual expenditure on Internet advertising in
the UK has increased from £8 million to £155
million in just four years (see Table 17.1).
Personal selling and sales promotion
These last two among the nine ingredients of
our promotional mix are sufficiently distinct
from the rest to merit chapters in their own
right. Consequently, this chapter will restrict
itself to the other seven.
Here, sales promotion(Chapter 18) is taken
to subsume ‘promotional literature’ (product
leaflets, sales brochures, corporate prospec-
tuses, annual reports and the like), which some
authors treat separately. Where it is located
matters less than the fact that those devices are
certainly alternative means of promoting the
product or service. Today, cyber-equivalents
will typically join the traditional printed mani-
festations in the sales promotion strategies of
forward-looking marketers.
Personal selling (Chapter 14) is the only
promotional technique to involve face-to-face
communication between seller and buyer, and
is normally the focus of an organizational
division quite separate from that with responsi-
bility for the rest of the mix.Public relations
The marketing literature routinely implies that
public relationsis an ingredient of the promo-
tional mix. However, the Institute of Public
Relations defines its purpose as ‘to establish
and maintain goodwill and mutual under-
standing between an organization and its pub-
lics’. Clearly, this activity has a broad and
strategic focus, in contrast to the specific tactical
aims of the promotional mix. To use an alter-
native terminology, it is corporate communica-
tion rather than marketing communications. It
seems likely that colloquial usage is confusing
public relations with publicity, perhaps simply
because the two sound alike but possibly also
because media stories generated by news relea-
ses and press conferences are the main tools of
the trade. In fact, PR campaigns often also
involve corporate advertising and sponsorship,
not to mention a range of other initiatives
beyond the boundaries of the promotional mix.
To take account of all this, academic authors
have recently begun to distinguish ‘marketing
public relations’ from ‘corporate public rela-
tions’, or MPR from CPR (Kitchen and Schultz,