Business Admin-Promotional mix

The first element of the promotional mix is advertising.  According to Kotler (1999) advertising is any paid form.   Advertising can be used to:

• Create awareness
• Broaden demand
• Remind and reassurance previous customers of the product or service

 There are many strengths to using advertising to promote a product or service.
  These are:

• Allows the firm to repeat the message many times
• Low cost per target audience for mass markets
• It allows the firm to demonstrate their product
• Can use advertising to trigger quick sales

Of course there are many weaknesses to using advertising.  These are:

• The cost of producing and transmitting the advertisement on TV is very expensive
• It can be hard to measure the effectiveness of an advertisement
• It is less persuasive than personal selling.

There are a number of ethical issues within advertising that need to be considered.  These are:

• Misleading advertising
• Deceptive advertising

The second element of the promotiona mix is Publicity
Public relation is 'the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics (Dibb et al, 1995)

The following are some of the publics associated with an organisation:

1. Media
2. Finance
3. Employees
4. Government
5. Public

Difference between advertising and publicity

• You have to pay for advertising whereas publicity tends to be free (you may have to pay for the hotel room for a conference, leaflets or brochures etc)
• Publicity is deemed to be more credible than advertising
• You can repeat an advert many times while publicity tends to be one off.
• The message in an advertisement tends to be more persuasive than publicity

The third element of the promotional mix is sales promotion
Sales promotion can be used to incresase sales in three ways:

1. Increase total market category
2. Encourage customers to switch from their usual brand another brand
3. Bring forward future purchases

There are many advantages to sales promotions.  These are:

1. Sales promotions can be used to encourage customers to buy a product or season off season
2. It can aid the selling off of slow moving stock
3. Can be used at any stage of the PLC

There are also a number of weaknesses which are as following:

• It can be expensive to implement a sales promotional plan
• There may be a lot of sales promotions on at the same time
• Sales may only increase for as long as the promotion is running

Personal selling is the second last element of the promotional mix.  Personal selling can be used for expensive goods and services.  It allows the potential customer to ask multiple questions regarding the product or service.

The final element of the promotional mix is sponsorship.  Sponsorship can be used to build and generate publicity for the company especially if the firm is sponsoring local sporting clubs.