Promotional Strategies

Keyword Concepts: promotion strategies

Promotion: It's a basic element of the marketing mix and includes all forms that secure communication between a firm and its public to bring about a favorable buying situation and achieve a Long-Distance confidence in the firm and the product or service it provides. Promotion both influences and it's influenced by the other marketing mix variables.

Promotional strategies

Promotion strategies are made up by combining three alternatives:

1) marketing of the same physical product everywhere,

2) adapting the physical product for foreign markets and

3) designing a different physical product with the same, adapted or different messages.

The six promotional strategies most commonly used are:

1) Same product - same message:

When marketers find that the markets hardly vary with respect to product and consumer attitudes, they can offer the same product and use the same promotional appeals in all markets.

The easiest and most profitable strategy is that of product and communication extension. The same product or service is sold worldwide using the same sales message.

The "product-communication extension" strategy has great appeal to most international companies because of the enormous cost savings associated with this approach. Important among these are the substantial economies resulting from the standardization of marketing communication.

E.g: Avon, Maidenform and A.T. Cross follow this strategy.

2) Same product - different message:

When a product or service covers a different need or serves a different function under similar or identical conditions to those in the central market, the only adjustment required is in marketing communications. The same product may satisfy a different need or be used differently elsewhere. The product may remain the same, but a different message is required.

The only additional costs are in identifying the different functions the firm's offering will service in foreign markets and in reformulating advertising, sales promotion, and other dimensions of market communications around the newly identified functions.

E.g.: Honda appeals to American people as a pleasure vehicle but in Brazil Honda displays its product as a means of transportation.

3) Product adaptation - same message:

In cases where the product serves the same function but must be adapted to different conditions the same message is used with another product.

E.g.: McDonald's followed this approach when it adapted the physical characteristics of its hamburgers to the different taste and user conditions of different countries while still advertising on a standard basis.

4) Product adaptation - message adaptation:

When both product use and buying habits are unlike of those of home country, both the message and the product must be modified though many basic attributes may remain constant, bringing economies of scale in the functions concerned with those attributes.

5) Different product - same message:

The company produce a very distinct product for the markets where potential customers cannot afford the product as manufactured in the firm's home country, but maintains the promotional message.

6) Different product for the same use - different message:

The use of a different product requires a different message.