What is the difference between promotion and sales promotion

Kokemuller has additional professional experience in marketing, retail and small business. Direct Sales Vs. By Neil Kokemuller. Direct Sales Basics Direct sales involves person-to-person selling in which a company salesperson communicates the benefits of products and services to prospective customers. Pros and Cons Direct selling is more personalized and engaging than other types of marketing. Promotion Basics A sales promotion is a form of advertising that focuses on short-term sales inducements.

Tactics and Goals Coupons, off-price discounts, rebates and percent-off sales are among common sales promotion techniques. References Business Dictionary: Direct Selling. What is the best definition of transferable skills.

What is the official name for the group of people who worked with the U. Department of Labor to develop a listing of important skill sets in Why is it important for job applicants to know what employers consider to be the traits of star employees. Sales and Customer Service 21 cards. Who benefitted from the slave trade.

What does a crocus look like. Where does information exchange begin in order to produce good customer service. Q: What is the difference between promotion and sales promotion? Write your answer Related questions. What is the difference between marketing and sales promotion? What is the difference between sales promotion and market promotion.? What is the Difference between sales letter and sales promotion letter?

What is the difference between advertising and sales promotion? What is the difference between sales promotion and direct marketing? What is the difference between sales letters and sales promotion letter?

Distinguish between advertising and sales promotion? Difference between export promotion and import substitution? What is the difference between health promotion and health education? What is the difference between advertising and salesmanship? Role of sales promotion in business? On the other hand, promotion uses multiple communication vehicles to send out messages to a much larger audience. However, promotional tools, such as advertising and direct marketing, communicate to customers.

In companies such as Xerox and DuPont, sales efforts play an instrumental role in selling products and serve as the human bridge between a company and its customers. But none of this data measures what is really important: the incremental sales of a product over and above those that would have happened without the advertising or promotion. Thanks to a new kind of marketing data, that situation is changing. The data correlate information on actual consumer purchases available from universal-product-code scanners used in supermarkets and drugstores with information on the kind of television advertising those consumers receive or the frequency and type of promotion events they see.

At the strategic level, managers must evaluate marketing data differently and put incremental sales and profits into management objectives. This means continually examining the appropriate balance between advertising and promotion, based on marginal-productivity analysis. The search for fresh, innovative television advertising to boost sales of established products should be constant. Until such advertising is found, it may pay to cut back on advertising spending.

Managers must also cut back on unproductive promotions in favor of hard-to-imitate promotion events that directly contribute to incremental profitability. And they must use the new data to shape distinctive promotional efforts for specific local markets and key accounts. New strategies that benefit both retailer and manufacturer must replace the traditional practice of using advertising and promotion as inducements to carry a product. Above all, senior managers must throw out much of the conventional wisdom about advertising and promotion that has formed over the years.

Replacing these widely held but unsupported beliefs with marketing strategies based on hard data is the key to attaining a new kind of market power.

Because they have been unable to measure the incremental sales of advertising and promotion before now, marketing managers have had to rely on a number of unexamined assumptions. For example, those who believe advertising works also tend to assume that in all cases, more of it is better than less. This assumption is frequently justified by another: that advertising takes a long time—many months or, sometimes, even years—to increase sales.

Another by-product of the traditional lack of data on incremental sales is the common belief that once advertising does start producing sales, its impact is short term. Finally, many marketing managers will tell you that even if advertising is not directly boosting sales, it still serves an important function.

When sales-people can point to a big ad budget, this convinces retailers that the manufacturer supports the product, thus assuring its distribution in the stores. So too with promotions. Traditionally, the focus has been on gross rather than incremental sales. The conventional wisdom is that a successful promotion is one where a company sells a lot of goods to the trade and that a promotion for an established brand can be used to attract and retain new users of the brand.

Our research challenges all of these beliefs. Since , we have been using single-source data to examine the productivity of the marketing dollar spent on advertising and promotions for consumer packaged goods.

The results are striking:. About 3, households in test markets receive ID cards that household members show when they purchase goods at scanner-equipped supermarkets. By agreement with the cable company and the advertiser, we intercept the cable signal before it reaches each household and send different advertisements to different households.

To test advertising copy, some households receive advertisement A, while others simultaneously receive advertisement B. To test advertising weight, households receive different amounts of advertising for the same brand.

Split-cable tests typically run for one year, and we have conducted them for both new and established products. We control for variables such as past brand and category purchases and statistically adjust the sales data to account for the impact of promotions for the test brand or for competing brands.

This instrumented test environment provides the ultimate degree of experimental control and is well suited for isolating the sales effect of advertising. Some of the findings from our split-cable tests conducted over the past decade support traditional assumptions.

For example, most people believe that advertising is more effective for new brands than for established brands, and this turns out to be the case. But in most respects, our findings clearly contradict conventional wisdom. In more than half of the established-brand experiments, increased advertising did not result in more sales.

Nor does advertising take a long time to work.