E-Marketing Professionals

Because there are four distinct promotion mix components (advertising, personal selling, promotion, and publicity or public relations), each with its own unique strengths and weaknesses, developing an effective promotion mix is difficult. To facilitate this task, most companies follow a five-step decision process, which is discussed below.

1. SETTING THE PROMOTIONAL OBJECTIVES Changes in sales and market share are often used as promotional objectives, but they are a function of the entire marketing program—not just the promotional mix. An exception is where the promotion requires an immediate response, such as direct-mail advertising, coupons, and catalogues. Acceptable promotional objectives follow from the situation analysis and involve four key components: a statement defining the target audience, a statement of how some aspect(s) of the audience's perceptions, attitudes, or behavior should change, a statement of how fast such a change should occur, and a statement as to the degree of change desired. One possible promotion objective for the BMW 1994 promotion program would involve generating awareness of BMW's new models, their price, and the company's superb engineering among members of the target audiences

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