I said earlier about—a little something each of the tools and I’ll do that now because here they are, to those of who are not familiar, these are the tools of the marking communications mix. And you’ll be familiar with most of them in name, but there are sometimes a few confusions, some elements that people get confused about. So, let’s just make sure we understand what these are.
Advertising concerns non-personal communication designed by an identified sponsor, yes, we need a sponsor clearly identified in order to endorse ideas, goods or services and deliver through paid for media. And that’s critical bit. Advertising is about buying media, renting time and space, owned by others in order to communicate our message. Some people, I’ve read and heard the public relations is about advertising or even worth free advertising—it is not. Public relations does not use paid for media, advertising does. And that’s one of it’s significant characteristics.
So let’s pick up the next one—Sales and Promotion—we’ve all been evolved the sales promotions activities certainly, you know. These are incentives. Sales promotions are used to encourage us to buying now rather than later. Buy this product now and we’ll get some benefit and that a benefit is very often a reduced price per unit or some additional gift, some premium or some other voucher or benefit that we might value. Sales promotion is about accelerating future sales and the value in sales promotion is a that we can use it to outbid our competitors.
So, I think you have a cat, yes, if you buy this cat food, and there are a couple of major players in this particular market for those products. And if you go to the supermarket, you’re very often see there’s a promotion on one of these brands and not on the other, or will go the next week and there’s a promotion on, let’s be honest—very often they enter head to head with incentives to encourage us to buy two packs for a reduced price. Now, you’ve got one cat, you buy two pack, are you going to feed all that to one cat in one week? I think not. Yeah, so what you’ve bought is two-week supply and not one week supply. And the effect of this of course is that you’ve taken your competitor act with the market place, you’re competitor is disadvantaged because you’re not in the market to buy the following week because you’ve got one at home.
So Sales Promotions have very often underestimated the value of sales promotions, it can immense in term of your competitive activity and the way in which you can actually defend the market share by taking customers enter the market place.
Public relations. Public relations is used to be concerned with the development of I think they said it was the interest and goodwill toward an organization. And then, learned colleagues evolve out understanding of public relations so that it’s now back to developing relationships and I think both are valid actually. They’re still valid. And whether it’s to do with the reputation of the organization or to do perhaps with reputation of the brand, it’s not really that important.
Public relations has an important role to play in the marketing communications mix and I think many SMEs—Small and Medium szed Enterprises don’t undertaking the public relations activities with regards to their mix of communications. It’s a very creditable form of communication because we’re not paying for media, we’re actually giving the opportunity to journalists and influences in the market place to talk authoritatively about our brand, and of course those messages are seen by the audience to be credible because they’re being communicated through third parties. So, public relations has a major role to play in the communications of most brand and most services.
Direct Marketing, direct marketing seeks to engage individual customers with the intention of delivering personalized messages. The goal is to build a relationship based upon their response and it’s this response element is its key to direct marketing and is the one element if you like that separated from the other components. We’re actually using direct marketing in order to stimulate a response. Remember, we talked about doing the behavioral component, that’s what direct marketing is striving to achieve and it’s a huge industry as I’m sure you all know.
Finally, Personal Selling. Personal Selling concerns interpersonal communications. It’s about face to face communications. It’s about being upfront which influence individuals or perhaps groups of buyers within organizations to act in a particular way. Personal Selling is a really important component particularly in the business to business market and we need personal selling in order to achieve particular goals in the communication process.
At the CIM I asked a question in a recent paper about how would you use personal selling through various process of the organizational decision making process and I was quite intrigued that many students did not respond by saying at one stage towards the end that we use personal selling to close order, personal selling is about affecting behavior, about actually getting buyers to make a positive decision, hopefully in your favor. Personal selling is a huge industry and very influential in terms of its activities.
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