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Pros and Cons of Promotional Marketing Campaign

Abstract

The Flower World needs effective marketing and promotional strategies to attract customers and educate the target audience about the new service and its benefits. Because of economic, social, and cultural needs, social institutions such as advertising arise. In an abundant economy, the provision of marketing information becomes a complex, expensive task.

Marketing Decision Making

Introduction

The communications process is concerned with disseminating stimuli and their perception, impact, use, and effectiveness. Marketing communications have meant that an individual’s predisposition or experience permits him to see, hear, or read them.

Communications Channels

An integrated promotional structure that reaches from the primary producer to the ultimate customer needs effective market communication. Via long, complicated networks that involve suppliers, retailers, wholesalers, clients, agencies, and media, conversations flow to markets. Each unit can break the chain or, as it sees fit, pass on the details. The quantity and quality of data, therefore, depends on the channel. In trying to reach people who can possibly buy a customer’s product, IMC is the most fundamental and perhaps most challenging task. About Allin (2009) explains marketing communications as “the mechanism by which the marketer creates and delivers an acceptable collection of communications stimuli to a given target audience with the aim of eliciting a desired set of responses” (p.37).

Pros and Cons of Promotional Marketing Campaign

Structured networks do not, however, take all marketing messages into consideration. Outside them lies publicity, which is an important part of many promotional campaigns and often precedes the advertising and sales effort. Although it can be crucial in gaining market acceptance for products and companies, publicity, like word of mouth, is often a relatively low-grade communications channel with a high degree of interference, distortion, and noise. Marketing communications serve four essential management purposes. First, the bridge information gaps existing among manufacturers, intermediaries, and customers. Second, they help coordinate the promotional activities of the total marketing system to achieve a coordinated thrust. Third, they help adjust the order to the customer and consumer requirements. Fourth, they adapt and help in improving the product to customer needs. The task of marketing communications is to get individuals or audiences to switch from a state of unconsciousness to one of affirmative action, or even adverse reaction. Unwareness, knowledge, understanding, belief, and intervention (Steve 2009) are the steps in this progression.
The theory of information is one that holds promise for marketing communications assessment. The major use to date is in electrical engineering. It deals with calculating a message’s information quality, self-information, bits of information, entropy, average information value, loose channels, and channels that are noisy and noiseless. Operational concepts, metrics, and a different context for thinking about marketing communications are presented. Although especially important, the concept of calculating the information quality of stimuli is not yet tractable, and the application of this aspect of communication theory to realistic marketing situations remains unattained. Investments in plant and equipment or inventory acquisitions are also being granted a careful financial analysis to be applied to advertisement expenses. Advertising messages face growing competition from a multitude of other advertisements, from other media, from rivals, and from all the activities that compete for the attention of an individual. More demands will be made on customer time as production swells and contact facilities increase, and the cost of marketing communications will skyrocket (Ng and Houston 2009).

Pros and Cons: Advertising

The advantage of advertising is that it allows the company to inform consumers about the service. Coordination of sales and advertising effort, however, is a weak area of marketing management. Often sales and advertising managers behave like rivals rather than members of the same marketing team. Lack of coordination affects sales and profits adversely, and both sales and costs can be pushed beyond optimal levels. However, the organizational changes reflected by the marketing-management concept and the brand-manager system are designed to provide more effective promotional campaigns that have a more significant market impact. Among the reasons for the lack of sales-advertising coordination are the following:

  1. Each area wishes to maintain control over the broadest possible group of activities.
  2. Sales and advertising are not considered as communication partners, and budgets are set independently.
  3. Salespeople do not use advertising programs or relate their presentations to them (the converse holds for advertising executives).
  4. The synergistic effect of an integrated promotional plan is not appreciated.

The negative issue of advertising is that it can hurt consumers’ choices because of poor and inadequate messages. Sales or advertising managers should not concern themselves with which group gets the most significant budget or is more important to the company. Instead, they should develop the most effective total marketing communications. Both should assess their relative contributions to the entire marketing task and view each other as an alternative and supporting communications resources as alternatives—the present management with different means of cultivating markets. The problem at this level is deciding what proportion of the total promotional budget should be allocated to each (Barak, 2009).

Pros and Cons: Direct Marketing

Even though a synergistic relationship often exists between them, direct marketing performs different parts of the marketing task. Direct marketing supports selling and makes it more effective. It can lower sales costs, which is important—direct marketing communications with mass markets. But advertising furnishes a one-way channel, and selling can be two way. Direct marketing is set, standardized, less adjustable, and impersonal. Personal sales can be tailored to individual situations at a cost. Another logical approach is to determine the communications functions that must be performed, such as making contact, creating interest, and closing the sale. Then either a predetermined total promotional budget can be allocated among each of these phases, based on executive judgment, or the expenditures on advertising and personal selling necessary to perform them may be estimated. In these ways, relative spending is established. The disadvantage of direct marketing is the low response rate and rejection of personal sales by many customers (Allin, 2009).

Pros and Cons: Sales Promotion

Sales promotion performs the requisite roles, which are both complementary and conflicting, of informing and persuading. Consumers want it to critically direct their consumption choices. In contrast, advertisers wish it to achieve mass selling by aggregating mass demand so that mass production can be stabilized and supported. The reasons for the use of advertising are clear. Promoting sales affects both costs and revenues; it can increase sales and profits when used effectively. It complements and enhances the efficiency of other components of the marketing mix. It changes the willingness of potential buyers. It provides data and gains brand loyalty, attracts clients and stimulates customer demand and action. Advertising is a strategic tool that can protect a market niche and ensure some consistency in the industry by forming demand curves, rendering them more inelastic and expanding markets as a main means of illuminating the qualities that distinguish a commodity. There is also a lack of agreement within an organisation as to what advertisement is supposed to achieve. It is targeted at the immediate effect of sales, the launch of a new product, the creation of a general image or the promotion of a brand name? All of these are legitimate Sales promotion tasks, each of which requires a different solution. It is germane to distinguish the responsibility of maintaining market position from cultivating and developing new markets. Marketing management must define its advertising tasks unambiguously before effective campaigns are launched. The disadvantage of sales promotions is the low response rate (“Aedgency Unveils,” 2009).

Pros and Cons: Public Relations

The nature of public relations tasks is indicated by the decisions that must be made: the amount of money to be spent on advertising, the allocation of the budget among classes of media, the specific media to be selected within each category, the frequency and continuity of ads, the makeup of the particular messages to be presented, and the kinds and amount of advertising research. These are difficult decisions to make. For instance, management is faced with deciding whether to advertise in markets where sales are high or low. Simple decision guides are lacking, but incomplete information may exist. For some agricultural products, for example, experiments indicate that sales increased significantly in those areas where sales volume was already highest. The disadvantage of public relations is the negative perception of the target audience and difficulty in reaching a diverse target audience (“Merrick Towle Communication” 2009).

Pros and Cons: Personal Selling

The role of personal selling in the marketing mix varies with the product and its stage of development. Advertising compresses time horizons for the acceptance of products and facilitates the introduction of new products. Managers have explained that a new product may be a fundamental, functional, or strategic innovation. Structural and functional innovations necessitate radical changes in consumer habits, which are difficult to achieve and require heavy advertising. Strategic and tactical innovations do not demand a significant shift in consumer habits, a fact that may shift the focus of the advertising job. The disadvantages of personal selling are low response rate, possible misunderstanding of the promotional messages, and very high costs (“Donovan Creative Communications” 2008).

Overview of the Product/Service

Flower World is a company that will allow immigrants, international students, or anyone else to send flowers and possibly other gifts to Central Asia from the US. All orders would be handled via the internet and local (target market country) vendors.

The rationale for choosing channels

Implementation of the First Campaign

  • Send Direct mail – twice in September and October and one on November;
  • Cinema ad – 7 times a day starting from the 20th of September to the end of November;
  • Radio ad – 10 times a day from the 5th of September to end of November;
  • Advertising in local Press – once a week from the 5th of September to end of November;
  • TV ad – 3 times in the evening starting from the 5th of September to end of November;
  • Posters in transport;
  • Calendars and wallcharts.

The Messages

The message will be: “Be really free with Flower World like a Bird” For people do not automatically stand willing and able to buy goods and services. The marketing mix, therefore, becomes an essential building block of markets. One of our stated economic goals is a high employment rate, which is directly related to both consumer investments and expenditures, and the business cycle.

Strategy to Measure the Effectiveness of the Campaign

Marketing executives often wonder how effective their advertising is. The problem is raised because of the magnitude of advertising expenditures and the opportunity to influence effectiveness significantly. It is calculated that “the best advertising in the latest issue of a leading Computer’s most popular applications currently occurs in data processing rather than problem-solving. Computers are used for high-speed analysis and communication of masses of data, thereby extending the information available for more rational advertising decisions. However, computers are also becoming a powerful tool for improving the effectiveness of advertising appropriations through the development of mathematical models. They are resulting in new approaches to solutions. Many attempts have been made to approach the problems of advertising brand switching by using a Markov process model. The measurement problem is also affected by the kind of advertising. At one extreme, we find direct-action advertising. Here a newspaper ad, a TV spot, or a direct-mail campaign is aimed at a sale to be held the following day by a retail establishment. The advertising expenditure and results can be noted, and good estimates of advertising effectiveness can often be made. At the other extreme, there is institutional or long-range advertising dedicated to image building. One interesting attempt to gain information about the relative effectiveness of potential advertisements or campaigns is using a Pupil-Response Apparatus or an eye camera. Such studies are based on the finding that the size of the pupil of the eye relates directly to the activity of the brain and vice versa. If people are interested in a stimulus such as an advertising campaign, the pupil expands in size; if they are not, the pupil contracts. Such findings could result in the selection of more effective advertising programs (“Direct Marketing Association” 2009).

Conclusion

For Flower World, IMC, as an institution, can be distinguished from advertising as an instrument, and both connotations have rich meaning for marketing management. As an institution, advertising has a role of mass communication that extends beyond the firm and influences changing economic systems, including those in socialist countries. The dissemination of information, presentation of ideas, and persuasion of people may require the use of various instruments and the application of many techniques. Whether advertising can help iron out business fluctuations is debatable. Still, there is evidence to suggest that it may have a positive effect. However, its impact on consumer spending is immediate and powerful, for by helping to create consumer confidence and optimism, advertising stimulates expenditure and generates economic vitality.

References
  • Allin, M. (2009). GROWERS’ VOICE IN THE BOARDROOM. AgriMarketing. 46 (9), 37. Retrieved April 12, 2009, from ProQuest.  
  • Anonymous. (2009. Agency Unveils Integrated Performance Marketing Suite With new
  • Branding and Website. Marketing Weekly News. Atlanta, March 21, p. 42. Retrieved April 12, 2009, from Academic Research Premier.  
  • Anonymous (2009). Merrick Towle Communications; Merrick Towle Communications
  • Appoints Director of Media and Director of Client Services and Strategy. Marketing Weekly News. Atlanta, March 21, p. 46. Retrieved April 12, 2009, from Academic Research Premier.  
  • Anonymous (2008). Donovan Creative Communications Inc.; Donovan Creative wins triple silver at prestigious international Davey Awards. Marketing Weekly News. Atlanta, Dec 06, p. 29. Retrieved April 12, 2009, from Academic Research Premier.  
  • Anonymous (2008). Direct Marketing Association; Direct Marketing Association Announces
  • Future of Business-to-Consumer Communications. Business and Finance Week. Nov. 11. pg. 48. Retrieved April 12, 2009, from Academic Research Premier.  
  • Barak, L. (May 2009). The Role of Within-Brand and Cross-Brand Communications in
  • Competitive Growth. Journal of Marketing., 73 (3), 19-34. Retrieved April 12, 2009, from Academic Research Premier.  
  • Ng, Sharon; Houston, Michael J. (2009). Field Dependency and Brand Cognitive Structures. 
  • Journal of Marketing Research (JMR), May 2009, 46 (2), pp. 279-292. Retrieved April 12, 2009, from Academic Research Premier.  
  • Steve, G. (2009). Marketing Through Web Sites. American Nurseryman, 209 (4), pp. 34-37  Retrieved April 12, 2009, from Academic Research Premier.  

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