Perreault−McCarthy: Basic
Marketing: A
Global−Managerial
Approach, 14/e- Advertising and Sales
Promotion
Text © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2002450 Chapter 16
Experts point to the Baked Lay’s mass-selling effort—the carefully planned adver-
tising and sales promotion—as an example of excellent promotion that leverages a
great strategy. Indeed, mass selling is often a critical element in the success or fail-
ure of a strategy. It can be an inexpensive way—on a per-contact or per-sale
basis—to inform, persuade, and activate customers. It can reach a large number of
people very quickly and produce a combination of long- and short-term results. It
often plays a central role in efforts to position a firm’s marketing mix as the one
that meets customers’ needs and builds brand equity. It can help motivate channel
members or a firm’s own employees, as well as final customers. The strengths and
limits of advertising and sales promotion are different, but you can see why most
promotion blends include them as well as personal selling and publicity.
Unfortunately, the results that marketers actually achievewith mass selling are very
uneven. It’s often said that half of the money spent on these activities is wasted—
but that too few managers know which half. Mass selling can be exciting and
involving or it can be downright obnoxious. Sometimes it’s based on careful analy-
sis and research, yet much of it is created on the fly based on someone’s crazy idea.
The right creative idea may produce results beyond a manager’s dreams, but the
wrong one can be a colossal waste of money. It can stir deep emotions or go unno-
ticed. Some managers come up with mass-selling blends that are really innovative,
but more often than not imitators will just copy the same idea and turn it into an
overused fad.
It’s important to realize from the outset that many managers do a poor job in this
arena. One way to avoid that is to reject the idea that just copying how lots of other
firms handle these important strategy decisions is “good enough.” There’s no sense
in following bad practices down the road to death-wish marketing. Instead, it makes
sense to understand the important strategy decisions involved in each of these areas
and how to make these decisions carefully.
As the Lay’s case illustrates, marketing managers and the advertising agencies
that work with them have important advertising decisions to make, including (1)
who their target audience is, (2) what kind of advertising to use, (3) how to reach
customers (via which types of media), (4) what to say to them (the copy thrust),
and (5) who will do the work—the firm’s own advertising department or outsidegenerating interest and trial.
For example, the trio of super-
models also appeared on a
crisp-covered float that
Frito-Lay sponsored for the
nationally televised New Year’s
Rose Parade. And to encour-
age trial, a million samples
were sent to households for
Super Bowl Sunday. Those
were followed during the next
two weekends with ads and
coupons in newspaper
free-standing inserts.
Two weeks into the cam-
paign, sales started to surge
and supply ran short. Con-sumers were even asking
friends to keep an eye out for
them. Some cynical critics said
that the shortages were just
another advertising gimmickcontrived for the publicity. But
the firm simply couldn’t keepup with demand—even with all
four factories working full tilt 24
hours a day.
There’s no doubt that clever
ads and timely sales promo-tion spurred consumer interest
in Baked Lay’s. But in the end,
what kept customers coming
back, even at a premium price,
was the superior value of aproduct that really met their
needs.^1Advertising, Sales Promotion, and Marketing Strategy Decisions