Stage-3: The Promotional Mode
Injunction: Promote!
Businesses must truly believe in their products, recognize that advertising requires focus and sacrifice and ensure persuasion is positive and backed by product quality. All these qualities emerge by activating the .
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Whatever complaints are made about advertising techniques, customers do need appropriate promotional communications from firms to discover the extent and merits of what is on offer—the difficulty for businesses lies in being «appropriate».
Note that promotion involves two distinct areas of choice: what product features count, and which likely prospects might be converted into paying customers.
Success depends on:
- Describing and defining products so as to add appeal.
- Analysing behaviours and preferences of prospective customers.
- Advertising that gets the message, the medium and the timing right.
- Crusading so as to be immediately recognizable by customers.
- Creating brands and sticking to the brand identity.
- Organising so as to close sales easily.
- Measuring the effectiveness of communications.
- Evaluating the strategic impact of marketing efforts.
Is product-centric? or market-centric? Or both?
Developmental Stimulus
Effective promotion attracts customers, but it alone cannot ensure they stay, to generate a stable base of support for the business. And without a stable base of customer support, any business is vulnerable.
A stable dependable customer base only develops on a mutual or reciprocal basis. Promotional hype and clever sales talk aside, customers must get something worthwhile at the right price (i.e. value for money). Mutuality? Reciprocity? Value? That’s Community-centred territory.
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Proceed to Stage-4: The Reciprocity Mode.
Originally posted: July 2009
All posted material is part of a scientific project and should be regarded as provisional. Visitors are encouraged to think through the topics and propositions for themselves. Copyright © Warren Kinston 2009-2016.
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