Internal factors

The main internal factors that affect the promotional activity are the initial aims and objectives that businesses set themselves. For example, there are such products as SAINSBURY’S energy drink which is almost exactly the same as ‘Redbull’ energy drink, for which there’s no such aim to promote this product on a large scale, because they are only targeting a certain area where they are located, as they sell SAINSBURY’S energy drink called ‘Blue Bolt’ in their own supermarkets only. In this case, the promotional activity that SAINSBURY’S carries out in terms of promoting this particular product is very limited and its main aim will be to target those people who live in the area where their business is located, and those customers’ who don’t have brand loyalty to ‘Redbull’ and are trying to search for the cheapest option. This, therefore not only allows ‘Sainsbury’s’ to benefit from the promotion carried out by ‘Redbull’ and cut their own costs of promoting ‘Blue Bolt’ energy drink, but also increase their competitiveness and share on the market, which might be a threat to ‘Redbull’.

There are also some other examples of such companies as ‘Coca-Cola’ that so well established, that they can actually cut their promotional spendings or decrease the number of sources that they use to advertise their products at, because it will still be well known anyway, which will allow them to save some money on advertising, whereas if there’s a company which has a similar product to Coca-Cola’s but which has just entered the market, it might be too difficult to compete which will be a constraint and it might be forced out of the market. Similarly, other firms such as ‘Subway’ also have takeaways but their initial aims and objectives were to spread everywhere as much as possible, so that there’s a ‘Subway’ takeaway in every town in the UK, and the promotional activity that they carry out was also influenced by these aims and objectives, because they are advertising their products in all different places. Some businesses such as oil producing companies e.g. ‘Surgutneftegaz’ are very big businesses with large profits, however, they don’t have an aim or objective to carry out a particular promotional activity to make their business well known on the market. This company doesn’t need to carry out big promotional campaigns, because consumers are more interested in finding such companies and buying oil and gas products from them, or co-operating with this company and supplying them with electric equipment. Such companies just appear to be well known, because they produce very demandable products on the market that significantly affect an economy of some countries, and there are very few such companies on the market which have as much oil and gas resources as ‘Surgutneftegaz’.

Other internal factors that can influence promotional activity of the business are the aims and objectives that the business sets for their promotional campaign. For instance, the aim for the business can be to target students and sell their products to them by offering them a good deal. This can be done by offering free laptops to students if they pay for the 2 year internet contract. The main aim of such promotion is to increase the number of their young customers who will be dependent on their service for a certain period of time and who are then likely to continue using their service, by offering them some good deals or allowing them to spread the cost of buying a new laptop over two years by allowing them to pay monthly. Such aim will, therefore, influence the way that promotional campaign is run and such things as the design of the promotion, which will be made in order to attract particular audience.

For other companies that produce a high range of consumer products, the product life cycle of which is relatively short, the market research that they carry out may influence their type of promotional activity quite significantly. For example, those companies that produce toys such as ‘Lego’ might carry out a survey and ask children to answer some questions about what type of ‘Lego’ they would like to have and etc. Such companies are then likely to stick to the information that they’ve obtained from their market research, and this will also influence their type of promotional activity, because it will be targeting children and promoting the features of the product that children will be most interested in.

The size of promotional budget can also be a significant factor that will influence the type of promotional activity that businesses do. For example, such businesses as small newsagents don’t usually have huge promotional budgets and are, therefore, unlikely to advertise their news agency on a TV, Radio, Internet or other media sources, because it may be too expensive for them to do. However, there may also be other companies such as ‘WH Smith’ which has a chain of newsagents, which do advertise in a variety of different media sources, using internet and newspapers in particular, because they have larger promotional budgets and are able to afford this. Therefore, their promotional activities are slightly different to the ones carried out by small newsagents, and are on a larger scale which effectively makes such businesses as ‘WH Smith’ more popular than the others, because they have an opportunity to use more effective promotional activities encouraging more customers than others.

In addition to this, there are some businesses for which the timescale is relatively significant when deciding what type of promotional activity to use. For instance, there are some businesses that are able to afford to carry out relatively expensive promotional activities in the short term, but in the long term due to a limited finance or if it’s a seasonal business. For example, for those firms producing ice-cream the time-scale can actually be quite important in terms of choosing an appropriate promotional method as well as saving some costs of promotion. Instead of promoting their products during the whole year, they may only promote their products during the times of the year when the weather is hot and at times when people consume ice-cream most frequently, however, it depends on the country and its climate. Such companies may save money on promotion and not advertise their products at all throughout the year, and when it comes to summer start heavily advertising their products on a TV, magazines and supermarkets. An example of a similar product is warm clothing such as jackets, coats, jumpers and etc. which are usually advertised more frequently just before the winter when it starts becoming very cold. There are also businesses producing equipments and products to set up fireworks. It is also a very seasonal business which is most popular during the winter or some special events such as Olympics and the timescale for some of such businesses is relatively important, because they have limited budgets to be spent on promotion of their products.

Дата добавления: 2015-07-26