The Marketing Book 5th Edition

MARKETING

PROCESS

CUSTOMER

BENEFIT

Marketing Culture

Marketing Objectives

Marketing Information

Marketing Strategy

Marketing Activities

Utility Affordability Accessibility

Desirability

Credibility

Visibility

Sales

Promotion

Selling

Advertising

and PR

PRODUCT PRICE PLACE PROMOTION

464 The Marketing Book

 Increase or maintain floor or shelf space for
products.
 Encourage stocking up by intermediaries.
 Gain support for special displays or other
promotional activities.
 Gain access to new sales outlets.
 Insulate intermediaries from temporary sales
downturns or pressure on margins.
 Reinforce communication to, or education of,
intermediaries.

In terms of measurability, the direct nature of
the consumer response makes their short-term
effects easier to measure accurately than those
for advertising, particularly with the data avail-
able from electronic point-of-sale (EPOS) sys-
tems. When running competitions, Heinz use a
sophisticated monitoring system using feed-
back scratch cards, to analyse the effects on
behaviour and buying patterns among partici-
pants. This allows them to build up an accurate
picture of the effect that such promotions can
have, and their effectiveness when used
through different grocery chains. Similarly, a
recent Pepsi promotion, offering four live CDs
in return for ring pulls, produced hundreds of

thousands of responses. Uniquely numbered

mailings allowed response to be measured with

pinpoint precision. One drawback of the meas-

urability that direct responses allow is that the

less measurable indirect responses relating to

brand awareness or image tend to be over-

looked. In Promomagazine’s 2001 survey of US

marketing practitioners, only 10 per cent of

those running promotions measured their

impact on awareness rates compared to around

50 per cent measuring sales volume or redemp-

tion rates.

This chapter aims to emphasize the differ-

ences between promotions and advertising,

which were perhaps best summed up by Hugh

Davidson (1975) as follows:

In general the purpose of advertising is to

improve attitudes towards a brand, while the

object of promotion is to translate favourable

attitudes into actual purchase. Advertising can-

not close a sale because its impact is too far

from the point of purchase, but promotion can

and does.

The comparative ability of promotions to close

sales reflects three key differences to advertising,

Figure 18.2 Satisfaction chain