Marketing Communication Methods
Should we use traditional marketing or digital marketing? This question is top-of-mind for all marketers. The decision to use one platform or outlet can mean the difference between success or failure. Evaluating each option is time-consuming but essential for forming a cohesive, meaningful marketing effort. This section looks at a variety of traditional media activities, including advertising, public relations, sales promotions, and direct marketing. It also explores digital marketing, including websites, interactive tools, content marketing, SEO (search engine optimization), and other strategies. As you read, consider the criteria you might need to use when determining which strategies are right for your organization and offerings.
Sales Promotions
Sales promotion helps make personal selling and advertising more effective. Sales promotions are marketing events or sales efforts - not including traditional advertising, personal selling, and public relations - that stimulate buying. Sales promotion can be developed as part of the social media or e-commerce effort just as advertising can, but the methods and tactics are much different. Sales promotion is a $300 billion - and growing - industry. Sales promotion is usually targeted toward either of two distinctly different markets. Consumer sales promotion is targeted to the ultimate consumer market. Trade sales promotion is directed to members of the marketing channel, such as wholesalers and retailers.
The goal of many promotion tactics is immediate purchase. Therefore, it makes sense when planning a sales-promotion campaign to target customers according to their general behavior. For instance, is the consumer loyal to the marketer's product or to the competitor's? Does the consumer switch brands readily in favor of the best deal? Does the consumer buy only the least expensive product, no matter what? Does the consumer buy any products in your category at all?
Proctor & Gamble
Figure 1. Pet lovers want the best for their animals, and choosing a proper diet is an essential part of raising happy, healthy pets. That's why many dog food providers such as Purina and Blue Buffalo are creating specific size- and age-appropriate diets for dogs.
Procter & Gamble believes shoppers make up their mind about a product in about the time it takes to read this paragraph.
This "first moment of truth," as P&G calls it, is the three to seven seconds when someone notices an item on a store shelf. Despite spending billions on traditional advertising, the consumer-products giant thinks this instant is one of its most important marketing opportunities. It recently created a position entitled Director of First Moment of Truth, or Director of FMOT (pronounced "EFF-mott"), to produce sharper, flashier in-store displays. There is a 15-person FMOT department at P&G headquarters in Cincinnati as well as 50 FMOT leaders stationed around the world.
One of P&G's most prominent in-store promotions has been for a new line of Pampers. In the United States, P&G came up with what it calls a "shopper concept" - a single promotional theme that allows it to pitch products in a novel way. The theme for Pampers was "Babies First". In stores, the company handed out information on childhood immunizations, car-seat safety, and healthy diets while promoting its diapers and wipes in other parts of the store. To market Pampers diapers in the United Kingdom, P&G persuaded retailers earlier this year to put fake doorknobs high up on restroom doors, to remind parents how much babies need to stretch.