Blog 9: The Promotional Elements in Marketing (Part 2)

Hi Everybody!

I hope you enjoyed learning about the first two promotional elements that companies use to market themselves and their products. Today we are going to talk about public relations, sales promotion, and direct marketing.

Public relations is a type of communication management that seeks to influence the feelings, opinions, or beliefs held by customers, prospective customers, stockholders, suppliers, employees, and other publics about a company and its products or services. Most of the time, companies will have their own public relations department. These departments will often use tools such as social media, special events, and press conferences. Many people still believe that publicity is the most important and powerful tool that a public relations department has. Publicity is a nonpersonal, indirectly paid presentation of an organization, product, or service. The thing that separates publicity from personal selling and advertising is the fact that companies do not have to pay for then publicity. This is because it can be seen in many different forms such as news stories, reviews, and consumer’s social media accounts. The biggest advantage that companies gain from publicity is credibility while it’s biggest disadvantage is that companies cannot control what others are saying about their brand. We see examples of publicity every day when we go onto social media, watch the news, look online for restaurant reviews or even when we are talking to a friend. When if I see a friend or an athlete that I follow on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter post something about a company that I have never heard I will sometimes be curious and go look at that company’s page. Even when I go on vacation I find myself looking at the Yelp reviews of restaurants in the area to see which one seems like the best choice. My favorite piece of publicity that I have seen recently is when the man from the Boston area started to sell the snow from in front of his house to people all over the country. This story became very popular with news outlets and I even believe that it was trending on Facebook for a while. This guy started this company as a joke but then because of all of the publicity his company started to make a more sales then he expected.

The fourth promotional element is sales promotion, which is a short-term inducement of value offered to arouse interest in buying a product or service. A few examples of sales promotion are coupons, discounts, and contests and these usually used with personal selling and advertising. Its main advantage is that these promotions are usually very short but still stimulates a lot of sales. The thing about these promotions is that sales will usually increase but then drop once the promotion goes away. Companies will then used advertising to try to build brand loyalty from those consumers who bought their product because of the sale. Everyday my email inbox gets filled with promotions from different companies. One website that I have used a few times called seshday.com only sells discounted products. What makes this company different is that they are a members only website and they only sell other companies products. These sales will only last for a few days. Everyday I receive an email that tells me which sales are about to end, which ones are just starting and some upcoming sales. Seshday also carries a lower inventory of these products, which stimulates its customers to hurry up to buy that specific product.

The fifth and final promotional element is called direct marketing, which uses direct communication with consumers to generate a response in the form of an order, a request for further information, or a visit to a retail outlet. This communication can be in many different forms such as magazines, mail, phone calls, face-to-face selling and online marketing. It’s main advantage is that you can customize the message to fit the specific target market that you want to communicate with while it can be a disadvantage because it can cost a lot of money to fill up databases with the most up-to-date information about your target market. An example of direct marketing is how a couple of times a year, local companies will fill up every student’s mailbox with coupons or ads that are direct at them. Usually we receive stuff from local restaurants or letters from the ski resorts telling us that it is almost time to buy our season pass for the upcoming year.

I hope that you all enjoyed this post!

See you next time!

Chris

Works Cited:
Kerin, Roger A., Steven W. Hartley, and William Rudelius. Marketing. 11th ed. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill/Irwin, 2013. Print.
Mailbox full of direct mail. Digital image. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Apr. 2015. 

"Man Sells Boston Snow Online | NBC Nightly News." YouTube. NBC News, 2 Mar. 2015. Web. 15 Apr. 2015. 

Seshday. Digital image. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Apr. 2015.