The Four Major Promotional Tools

Companies have to develop good products or services, price them attractively, and make them accessible to their target customers. But this is not enough: they also have to use various promotional tools to generate sales. According to a classification used in most marketing textbooks, advertising is only one of four standard promotional tools. The others are sales promotions, public relations, and personal selling. Read the text about promotional strategies and do the tasks that follow.

The basic idea behind the 'marketing concept' - that you make what you can sell rather than sell what you make - does not mean that your product will sell all by itself. Even a good, attractively-priced product that clearly satisfies a need has to be made known to its (1)............... customers. During the introduction and growth stages of the standard product life cycle, the producer (or importer, and so on) has to develop product or brand (2)............. i.e. inform potential customers (and distributors, dealers and retailers) about the product's existence, its features, its advantages, and so on.

According to the well-known ‘Four Ps’ formulation of the marketing mix (product, place, promotion and price), this is clearly a matter of promotion. Since budgets are always limited, marketers usually have to decide which tools - advertising, public relations, sales promotion, or personal selling - to use, and in what proportion.

Public relations (often abbreviated to PR) is concerned with maintaining, improving or protecting the image of a company or product. The most important element of PRispublicity which (as opposed to advertising) is any mention of a company's products that is not paid for, in any (3)............... read, viewed or heard by a company's customers or potential customers, aimed at assisting sales. Many companies attempt to Place stories or information in news media to attract attention to a product or service. Publicity can have a huge impact on public awareness that could not be achieved by advertising, or at least not without an enormous cost. A lot of research has shown that people are more likely to read and believe publicity than advertising.

Sales promotions such as free samples, coupons, price reductions, competitions,andso on, are temporary (4)............ designed to stimulate eitherearlier or stronger salesof a product. Free samples, for example, (combined with extensive advertising), may generate the initial (5)............... of a new product. But the majority of products available at any given time are of course in the (6)............... stage of the life cycle. This may last many years, until the product beginsto be replaced by new ones and enters the decline stage. During this time, marketers can try out a number of promotional strategies and tactics. Reduced-price packs in supermarkets, for example, can be used to attract price-conscious brand-switchers, and also to counter a promotion by a competitor. Stores also often reduce prices of specific items as loss leaders which bring customers into the shop where they will also buy other goods.

Sales promotions can also be (7).............. at distributors, dealers and retailers, to encourage them to stock new items or larger quantities, or to encourage off-season buying, or the stocking of items related to an existing product. They might equally be designed to strengthen brand (8)............. among retailers, or gain entry to new markets. Sales promotions can also be aimed at the salesforce,encouraging them to increase their activities in selling a particular product.

Personal selling is the most expensive promotional tool, and is generallyonlyusedsparingly, e.g. as a complement to (9)...... . As well as prospecting for customers, spreading information about a company's products and services, selling these products and services, and assisting customers with possible technical problems, salespeople have another important function. Since they are often the only person from a company that customers see, they are an extremely important (10)....... of information. It has been calculated that themajority of new product ideas come from customers via sales representatives.