472 The Marketing Book
premiums, promotions can engage and com-
municate with different customer groups.
Advertising’s approach to communication
is rooted in the early physical systems-based
approaches to human communication devel-
oped in the 1940s and 1950s by the likes of
Lasswell and Schramm. The message is seen as a
‘magic bullet’ transferring encoded information
from a sender (the advertiser) to be absorbed
and decoded, relatively passively, by a receiver
(the target audience). Promotions reflect more
contemporary theories of human communica-
tion, which stress its social context and processes
of sharing, response and interaction. Promo-
tions communicate with the aim of encouraging
interaction between the producer and the con-
sumer, through a sale, the clipping of a coupon
or the testing of a product sample.
In terms of persuasion, promotions’ direct
response orientation has focused attention on
the ‘action’ phase of the classic AIDA model
(see Chapter 17) when discussing their commu-
nications capabilities. In fact, promotions work
effectively during each phase of this commu-
nication process:
1 Attention. Promotions are undoubtedly
attention grabbing. Words such as ‘Extra’,
‘Free’, ‘Win’ and ‘Special’ all help promoted
products to stand out on the shelves of today’s
supermarkets. A typical Tesco store will
contain around 50 000 different products
jostling for the consumer’s attention.
2 Interest. Promotions can inject novelty and
even fun into the most familiar or mundane of
products. Financial services companies have
found that promotional competitions create
considerable interest among customers and
staff, which can be important in a price
competitive market with an intangible product
(Peattie and Peattie, 1994). Barclays 1998 Nest
Egg competition encouraged customers to
discuss their savings needs with a ‘Personal
Banker’ with the lure of £100 000 in prizes and
a free Cadbury’s Creme Egg for everyone.
3 Desire. Encouraged by the offer of additional
benefits. Research by Millward Brown and ASL
into the 1996 Cadbury’s Coronation Street
interactive on-pack promotion showed that 26
per cent of adults were aware of the
promotion and that the lure of the 8 million
prizes made 13 per cent feel encouraged to
buy more Cadbury’s bars.
4 Action. Promotions differ from advertising
(with the exception of direct response
advertising) in seeking a direct response such
as replacing a consumer durable or
overcoming their previous objections to a
brand and sampling it. For the majority of
promotions the action sought is a sale, and
promotions have been demonstrated as
effective in increasing the consumer’s sales
volume and rate of consumption (Ailawadi and
Neslin, 1998).Promotions can also go beyond prompting
action to create interaction and consumer
involvement with a product, by requiring
them to analyse and rank its attributes, create
a recipe around it, test drive it or sum up its
virtues in 10 words or less. While advertising
is a one-way communication process, promo-
tions can create a dialogue. Competitions,
direct mail promotions and sampling pro-
grammes are increasingly being used to gather
information from consumers, as well as to
send messages to them. Guinness used ques-
tions on a competition leaflet to help pinpoint
more accurately their key competitors in the
canned beer market. Beamish Stout capitalized
on their sponsorship of the Inspector Morse
TV series by sending out a squad of ‘police-
women’. They persuaded drinkers to ‘help
with their enquiries’, and combined an effect-
ive sampling promotion with a major market
research exercise. Kelloggs and Gillette have
also used promotions to build up consumer
databases and contacts. Kelloggs provided an
extra entry into its 2000 Pokemon Mastercom-
petition for each E-card that customers sent
onto their friends, and Gillette’s Venusrazor
on-line sweepstake offered extra entries to
customers in return for their friends’ e-mail
addresses.