DOING SALES PROMOTIONS
Sales promotion has often been seen as a business’ short-term tactic to generate sales. It works but it often comes with a dilemma, Change your marketing strategy too often and the brand loses its identity. Change it too little, and more flexible, competitors can overtake you. Sales promotion is a tool that cuts across all the components of the brand. That is why a balance of tactic and strategy is your key to marketing effectively.
Business success is always an interplay between short-term and long-term, tactical and strategic. Companies succeed by thinking about tomorrow, but they fail if, in doing so, they forget about today; the reverse is also true. The best strategy is always adaptive.
Sales promotion shares with direct marketing the benefit it can achieve short-term effects, that campaigns can be conceived and implemented in a matter of days, and that the result can be seen in a matter of weeks. As such, sales promotion fits well with the “just in time” approach to business, which is already familiar in manufacturing stock control and delivery cycles.
Taking a tactical approach to sales promotion means having up your sleeve a number of promotional concepts that can be put into effect as and when they are called for. Large manufacturing companies approach this by issuing their sales force with a range of promotions in concept form that can be put into effect with particular retailers whenever the sales situation demands. It means having the imagination, speed, and resourcefulness to react quickly to competitive pressure and seize short-term market opportunities. These are tactics at their best, but does that mean sales promotion is not strategic?
Strategies
Any business activity benefits from being planned in a strategic manner. Strategy is about identifying distinctive capabilities and translating them into competitive advantage in the relationships of the company with its customers and suppliers. It’s about your Unique Selling Point (USP).
Sales promotion is strategic if it enhances the firm’s distinctive capabilities, increases its competitive advantages, and builds its long-term relationships. It is the reverse if it undermines them. That can easily happen in sales promotion. A cut-price offer on a prestige brand, a promotion that is badly administered and leaves customers feeling aggrieved, an offer that promises more than it delivers - all these can undermine long-term relationships. A feeble “me too” offer copied from a competitor can undermine distinctive positioning.
Most of the time, The characteristics of a good tactical promotion are characteristics of a good strategic promotion. It can be both good but can also be bad.
There are several reasons for taking the strategic approach to planning a sales promotion. It enables one offer to build on the previous one, and to establish a continuity in the communication. It can help produce considerable savings in time and money and can speed up response times. Strategic Planning also enables promotional offers to be fully integrated into other activities in the marketing program.
Sadly, even the largest companies do not always do this. This is often because responsibility for sales promotion is passed to a staff whose horizons are shorter, and sometimes even to a money-sucking agency who have not been briefed properly on strategic issues. This is a pity; It makes promotions less effective and does not reflect the importance of sales promotion in business today. The remedy lies in the hands of those charged with the responsibility to understand the relationships the company is dealing with, The senior managers.
Here are five things you should do in order to establish a strategic approach to sales promotion:
Understand the strategic framework in terms of competitive advantage and positioning that should underpin every sales promotion as any other marketing activity.
Establish guidelines for each product or service that you are offering, This will help you come up with a sales promotion that best suits it.
Ensure that sales promotions are handled or overseen by sufficiently senior executives so that they are conceived, integrated, and implemented professionally.
Insist that sales promotions are well researched and evaluated through marketing accountability measurement in a way that enables you to assess their performance, and compare it to other types of marketing expenditure
Plan and budget for your use of sales promotion over the year ahead so that the promotions become integral to your marketing effort and alongside other marketing activities.
Tactics and Strategies are the building blocks of an effective sales promotion. It is well worth taking a look at the promotions your company has run over the previous years. Ask yourself, How they have contributed to your long-term differential advantage. Were they good tactics or good strategy? That is the goal to search for.
