B) How and when each form of promotional activity is used

Such promotional activities as advertising the product on the TV and radio and internet are usually used to make people aware of the new product or promoting the brand or the product and making it more popular amongst the other products available on the market, without actually encouraging people to buy it. However, it depends on the type of TV or radio advert used, because some adverts are not necessarily aimed to make the brand more popular, but to inform the potential consumers about any special offers and encourage them to actually go and buy the product. In addition to this, if the product or service is in the niche market, TV and Radio can be used to target particular groups of the people, who are more likely to be potential customers. For example, if we look at the Honda’s TV advert, it is trying to use a clever, memorable advert, which is different to the other TV adverts about cars shown on a TV. In addition to this, Honda often shows this advert on the TV channels such as ‘Dave’ in the UK, before or after the ‘Top Gear’ TV programme, which allows Honda to target those people who may be more interested in cars or maybe buying one, which increases the effectiveness of such advertising on a TV.

For instance, from the FT newspaper advert that I have provided, it is evident that advertising in the newspapers such as Financial Times, as shown in one of my examples also gives an opportunity to target particular groups of people as well as include some booklets and sheets with the information about special offers, like the one shown in my example from the FT newspaper advertising ‘Chopard’ watch. Although FT newspaper is not as expensive as some other magazines and newspapers, it is still aimed at those people who are interested in business and economics, and these people are often the ones who are on a relatively high wage, who are quite likely to afford such an expensive watch as ‘Chopard’, and therefore advertising and targeting this particular group of people makes more sense and is more effective, than if it was advertised in a teenage magazine or a woman’s magazine such as ‘Cosmopolitan’, because the watch shown in this advert is initially aimed at men rather than women. There may also be discount cards, or trials (samples) e.g. a CD album, a sample of shampoo or a stripe of a new fragrance in the magazines. Such adverts are either aimed to encourage people’s attention by making the advert memorable with the aim to promote the brand, or encourage consumers to try a new product.

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One of the types of promotional campaigns which encourages repeat purchases, as shown on the example above, is when the firm, such as Coca Cola informs consumers that under each lid of the bottle, there might be a special sign, and if you collect a certain number of such special lids, you may win a prize such as radio or a Coca Cola glass. Such promotional activity as the one used by Coca-Cola encourages customers to buy the product again and again, which increases both sales and the popularity of an already well-established brand, and giving customers out prizes for that they consume their products or drink Coca-Cola, is also encouraging people to buy more of their products and creates a certain brand loyalty, because customers may have purchased similar products from the other companies which didn’t give them out any prizes.

Another example is giving out discount and loyalty cards. Such things encourage repeat purchases, because in case with the discount card the more you buy, the higher the percentage discount you get on the products. With loyalty cards, it encourages consumers to think they’re special customers, so that they come to the place or buy the product more often, which also guarantees them the best offer.

Other promotional methods such as ‘BOGOF’, or buy 3 for the price of 2 encourage consumers to buy a product, usually until a certain date, and get a free product or a complimentary product, e.g. buy a box of chocolates and get a free coffee cup. From the example of the ‘BOGOF’ advert by ‘Johnsmiths’ shown on the left, we can clearly see that a great use of colours, making the advert looking funny and attractive encourages consumers’ attention and such promotional activity as giving customers out a free product if they buy one, is mainly used to encourage stockpiling and encourage people to buy more of the product as in our case, as well as getting rid of what the company doesn’t need any more or is struggling to sell. Such promotional activities may also help businesses to increase their sales quite rapidly in the short period of time. For example, due to dramatic decrease in a car selling industry crisis and stock piling, there has recently been an advert by Peugeot that was giving a second car you buy from Peugeot for free, so basically ‘BOGOF’. Although, such promotional methods are not normally used in such industries, it has helped Peugeot to get rid off additional stock relatively quickly with much lower costs, if it didn’t sell any cars at all. Similarly in Russia ‘Lexus’ car company was offering a 5500 pounds package of options such as bigger rims, winter tyres, sat navigation, DVD screens in the seats and a lower insurance for the first year, if you bought the RX 350 model before the 1^st January.

Such promotions as e-mailing consumers who have, for example, previously bought something from the company, allows to inform consumers about special offers and provides them with the links to buy particular products, so that they can go straight on to the website and buy products on-line.

This method of promotion can be effective if only the customer is actually interested in the products and reads the e-mails he/she receives. This type of promotion is often associated with sending spam, and people often delete such e-mails without even reading them, or new spam filters may consider a promotional letter to be spam and delete it automatically, which doesn’t make this method of promotion very effective. However, big numbers of people can be targeted and even particular age, gender, and interest groups of people.

From the examples of the e-mails and letters from ‘Amazon’, given above, we can clearly identify how often tries to advertise the products that a customer can buy on their website. Due to the fact, that you need to have an account with ‘Amazon’ in order to be able to buy anything on their website, they have all information about the products you buy, so that even when they send you a confirmation about your previous order, below they can put some adverts or links, or send you promotional offers about similar products that a customer has ordered before or similar products or products in the same category, which a customer might be interested in. Also, due tot the fact that if you decided to become an ‘Amazon’ customer you need to go through the registration process, it makes this method of promotion even more effective, because they have all the information about your age, gender, home address, your main interests, and there’s also a higher chance that the customer will stick with this particular company when he/she will be buying any products, as he/she is already registered on their website and might not bother to go and register on another on-line shopping website.

Дата добавления: 2015-07-26