Engaging Consumers and Communicating Customer Value

The Promotion Mix

The promotion mix is the marketer’s bag of tools for engaging and communicating with  customers and other stakeholders. To deliver a clear and compelling message, each tool must be carefully coordinated under the concept of integrated marketing communications (IMC).

Advertising,

Any paid form of nonpersonal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods, or services by an identified sponsor.

Sales promotion,

Short-term incentives to encourage the purchase or sale of a product or service.

Personal selling,

Personal customer interactions by the firm’s sales force for the purpose of engaging customers, making sales, and building customer relationships.

Public relations (PR),

Building good relations with the company’s various publics by obtaining favorable publicity, building up a good corporate image, and handling or heading off unfavorable rumors, stories, and events.

Direct and digital marketing,

Engaging directly with carefully targeted individual consumers and customer communities to both obtain an immediate response and build lasting customer relationships

Integrated Marketing Communications

Integrated marketing communications—IMC—is a really hot topic these days. No other area of marketing is changing so quickly and profoundly.

A big part of the reason is the huge surge in customer engagement through digital media—online, mobile, and social media marketing.

Setting the Total Promotion Budget and Mix

• The affordable method, Setting the promotion budget at the level management thinks the company can afford.
• The percentage-of-sales method, Setting the promotion budget at a certain percentage of current or forecasted sales or as a percentage of the unit sales price
• The competitive-parity method, Setting the promotion budget to match competitors outlays.
• The objective-and-task method, Developing the promotion budget by (1) defining specific promotion objectives, (2) determining the tasks needed to achieve these objectives, and (3) estimating the costs of performing these tasks. The sum of these costs is the proposed promotion budget.