Blog 8: The Promotional Elements in Marketing

Hey Everybody!

Today I am going to talk about the five promotional elements that companies will use to communicate with their consumers. These five elements are advertising, personal selling, public relations, sales promotion, and direct marketing. Advertising, public relations, and sales promotion use what is called mass selling because they are used to communicate with groups of prospective buyers. The other two elements use what is called customized interaction because they target a specific customer. Personal selling is when the seller talks directly to the buyer through meeting, phone calls and emails, while direct marketing also uses customized messages to each specific customer.

Companies advertise when they pay for any form of nonpersonal communication about an organization, product, service or idea by an identified sponsor. This includes using mass media like TV's, radios, magazines and newspapers. It is important for a company to do their research before sharing their advertisement with the world. You want to know for sure that the consumer that you are targeting with see this advertisement and that the message will be clear. Just like anything else in the world, advertising has some strengths and weaknesses. The nice thing about ads is that they can get a person's attention very quickly and they can communicate specific product benefits to the potential consumers. The two big weaknesses of advertising is that it costs a lot to produce one and you do not receive that much feedback from consumers about your ad. I believe that the ad that you see right beneath this paragraph is really effective. It is showing us that when we over use water we can affect animals or people without even realizing it.

Another popular promotional element is personal selling. This is when there is a two-way flow of communication between a buyer and seller designed to influence a person's or group's purchase decision. The nice thing about personal selling that really sets itself apart from advertising is that it is usually face-to-face communication between the seller and consumer. This is important for businesses because they can control whom they are speaking with. This allows the seller to quickly receive feedback from the potential buyer, which they can't do through advertisements. This allows them to fix their message to better get their point across to their prospective buyer. One of the biggest disadvantages of personal selling has to be how much it cost to speak to each potential customer individually. Personal selling tends to be the most expensive promotional element because of the high cost. A good example of personal selling is when phone and Internet companies use sales representatives to sell their products to residential properties or other businesses. Comcast does this a good amount of the time. My uncle works for Comcast Business as a sales representative so basically he goes to a bunch of companies each day to see if they want to either renew their contract with Comcast or leave a competitors company for Comcast. I also know a little bit about this myself because I occasionally will sell custom die cut stickers and I always have to deal with customers complaining about the price of my product and because of this I usually end up having to change my prices depending on the feedback that the current customer is giving me as well as what customers in the past have said to me.

I hope that you guys enjoyed this post! Next time we are going to finish our conversation by talking about the last three promotional elements!

See You Then!

Chris

Work Cited:

Comcast Business Logo. Digital image. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Apr. 2015.

Kerin, Roger A., Steven W. Hartley, and William Rudelius. Marketing. 11th ed. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill/Irwin, 2013. Print. 

Promotional Elements. Digital image. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Apr. 2015.

Save Water Fishbowl. Digital image. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Apr. 2015.