MARKETING STRATEGIES IV

PROMOTION
Promotion of your products or services involves two elements, both of which relate your selling effort to your market.

What is your product message? Describe your product or service so that your customers will recognize the benefits they can expect from purchasing it.

How will you deliver the message? Select marketing channels that will reach your audience. Advertise to a large audience through radio, television, or newspapers. Use merchandising activities such as displays and product support activities. Utilize direct face-to-face selling. Or do you consider your location alone sufficient to attract all the customers that you need?

Frequently, a combination of efforts is necessary for success. Through advertising, you attract a certain number of potential customers to your business. Once there, displays and merchandising aids heighten the customer's interest in buying. Finally, a salesperson takes the time to present and demonstrate your product to close the sale.

All marketing, from large-scale advertising to direct person-to-person contact, must be aimed at satisfying the purchaser's buying motives. Therefore, the buying motives of the audience you are trying to reach must be understood before you can select the product message and media channel which will best serve your needs.

Buying Motives
Why do people buy? Not so much for the sake of owning specific things, but to satisfy certain basic needs or wants. Some of these basic needs or wants are relatively simple, such as physiological needs -- clothing to keep warm, food to avoid hunger, or medicine to relieve pain.

People's buying motives are also determined by wants. A desire for comfort or an interest in styling will often dictate people's preference in furniture, cars, and clothing.

As a marketer, you must convince potential customers that your product or service meets their needs and wants and that it satisfies one or more of their buying motives. You can do this only by relating your product to their needs and wants, and by proving how it will satisfy their buying motives.

Product Features and Benefits
The product or service that you sell may have any number of features that appeal to your market. A feature is usually a specific product characteristic. A temperature control could be a feature of a clothes washer. A remote channel selector could be a feature of a television set. A 1,000 watt capacity could be a feature of a hair drier.

But what do these features mean to the buyer? How do they satisfy buying motives? With relatively simple products, the buyer is often familiar with the advantages that the features offer. In many other cases, you may have to explain how the features of your product satisfy the customer's buying motives.

Features Related to Buying Motives
Any description of features must be related to the prospect's buying motives. The temperature control of the washer provides protection for the owner's fabrics. The remote TV channel selector offers the convenience of channel changing without leaving your seat. The key words are protection and convenience--basic buying motives or benefits that people look for when they buy a wide variety of products or services, not just washers or television sets.

Suppose you sell insulated windows with flexible vinyl glazing. Mr. and Mrs. Wilson enter your store to look at insulated windows. They already know that insulated windows reduce heating costs because they have talked with other suppliers. Why should they buy yours instead of theirs? If you said, "Mr. and Mrs. Wilson, these windows have flexible vinyl glazing," their answer would probably be, "So what?", a shrug of the shoulders, or "What is the price?" Flexible vinyl glazing means nothing to the average customer.

As a seller, you must explain the advantages of the flexible vinyl glazing in terms that show Mr. and Mrs. Wilson the benefits that they would realize. If you explain, "Flexible vinyl glazing won't chip and will not require painting," the Wilsons will recognize how this will preserve the appearance of their windows and eliminate the cost and inconvenience of maintenance.

Complicated Products
In today's world, products are becoming increasingly complicated: to prompt a customer to buy, technical features must be explained in terms of the increased satisfaction that they will bring to the owner. If customers do not understand how advanced, sophisticated features provide them with specific benefits, the technology and cost of these features are wasted.

Selling at Premium Prices
If you are selling a product at a premium price, it is particularly important to explain your product in terms of the benefits that it offers the customer. This must hold true in advertising, promotional materials, or selling directly to a customer.

Direct Selling and Your Product Message
Although not all products or services are sold person-to-person, an understanding of the direct selling process is often useful in explaining the key elements of any successful marketing message.

Customizing Your Marketing Message
Direct selling is the ideal marketing situation. When you are face-to-face with a customer, you have an opportunity to find out which specific benefits are most important to the particular customer. Then you can explain how your product or service provides those benefits.

Not all prospects will be interested in all the benefits that your productoffers. For example, your product may offer superior styling, quality, and convenience. If you know that a prospect doesn't care about styling, you would stress the quality and convenience features of your product.

Detailed Presentation
A direct selling situation lets you present your product or service in more detail than an advertisement. You have the prospect's attention and the time needed to explain your product thoroughly.

Naturally, direct selling does not apply to many products and services. Perhaps the price is too low to justify the time or the audience is too scattered and too numerous to permit talking with each individual customer. These customers can only be reached through advertising.

The selling principles of a successful direct selling effort are equally valid in shaping a message to larger audiences. Therefore, to understand the basics of the sales message, we will begin by analyzing the direct selling situation. Later we will relate these principles to developing the message for other marketing channels.