Pros and cons of the promotional mix

In today business, by just having a good varieties of product is not sufficient to accomplished great result. There is no use by having a very good product when no one knows about them. This is when promotion comes in, to describe any activity by a business for informing, influencing and persuading customers. In a nutshell, promotion is all about companies communicating with customer. In total there are four key elements in the promotional mix which is advertising, personnel selling, sales promotion and public relations tools. No matter how good a strategy or a plan is perform; advantage and disadvantage are surely to exist. The main purpose of conducting this literature review is to precisely identify the advantages and disadvantages of the four elements.

One of the most popular promotional elements that company usually us is the advertising, but before we look into the pros and cons of this element. We first have to study its definition, what really is advertising? According to tutor2u® advertising is any paid form of non-personal communication of ideas or products in the “prime media”. Examples are television, newspapers, magazines, billboard posters, radio, and cinema. Advertising is intended to persuade and to inform. The two basic aspects of advertising are the message (what you want your communication to say) and the medium (how you get your message across).

After looking at the definition, we move on to the pros and cons of this element, first of all if u plan to reach out to a wide range if audience then advertising is the best choice. Advertising is very useful in the beginning of a product life cycle; this is because it helps a lot in building brand awareness. Although it enables company to reach out to a wide audience but advertising are unable to persuade customer to make the final purchasing decision. This is because advertising is a one way communication. Only buy advertisement itself, it is not possible to answer all customers question. In other words, advertising is impersonal.

Another famous way of doing promotions is through personnel selling. In terms of function personnel selling is quite different compare to advertising. In simple advertising is to build awareness while a personnel selling is to make sales. A simple definition of personnel selling is Oral communication with potential buyers of a product with the intention of making a sale. The personal selling may focus initially on developing a relationship with the potential buyer, but will always ultimately end with an attempt to “close the sale”. (http://tutor2u.net/business/marketing/promotion_mix.asp). Each and every element has their advantages and disadvantages; personnel selling have the most advantage when a complex and detailed product need to be explain. This is because it provide a high interactive communication or a two way communication, this is because each and every question from the buyer will be answered.

Through personnel selling not just sales can be close but it also builds relationships. When a long time is needed to close the sells personnel selling is the most efficient because of the relationship that is build. Although in a way personnel selling is very good, but under certain circumstances it also have its disadvantages. Personnel’s selling tends to be more costly, this is because not only we have to pay the wages to the personnel seller, and there are some hidden costs that we have to absorb. A personnel selling is also not suitable when there are thousands of important buyers, because it is difficult to allocate such a huge workforce into the market.

Sales promotion is another way that a company can increase its sales. The role of sales promotion is to provide incentives to customers or to the distribution channel to stimulate demand for a product. Examples of sales promotion can be often see is In-store demonstrations, displays, contests and price incentives (50% off, buy-one-get-one-free .()When short goals are aim sales promotion is the best way compare to other elements for having a high percentage rate of success. It stimulates quick increases in sales by targeting promotional incentives on particular products. We can often see this sales promotion in shopping complex when they offer huge rate of discount to attract customer in a period of time. While in the long term sales promotion is not so successful because customer will eventually get numb to the effect of the promotion. Although sales promotion pushes sales up very quick but when it is overdo it will bring harm to the image of the brand.

The last element of promotional mix is public relations or also known as publicity which something that ‘happens’ to a company and the result may be good or bad. Public relations (or PR) involve a sustained attempt to develop your reputation as a business by using the media to help create the image you desire. It is a way of keeping the business in your customers’ eyes (The Chartered Institute of Marketing 2001). By using public relations information seems to be more ‘credible’ because it is through third party. It is also cheaper to use public relations unlike other promotional mix elements because if the right publicity is achieved through the right media it can reach a huge amount of customer. Although is cheap and more credible, public relation too can cause harm to the business because we are unable to control what others say or write thus if any bad news of the company is spread we are unable to do anything about it.

In conclusion, each and every element has their pros and cons, it is our job as a marketer to develop and implement the best promotional mix to increase the brand and profit of a company. Promotions should not only just consist one element; we have too delicately balance the elements of the promotional mix to satisfy the needs of a product and company.