Consumer Oriented and Trade Oriented Sales Promotion

Consumer and Trade Oriented Sales Promotion
In this unit we are discussing sales promotion. This is where the company offers an incentive or value if they buy their product. There are two types of sales promotions we are going to discuss. Consume oriented which includes sampling, couponing, premium, contests,and sweepstakes, refunds and rebates, bonus packs, price-offs, frequency programs and event marketing. These promotional tools are aimed at consumers to get them to ultimately buy a product. Trade Oriented involves dealer contests and incentives, trade allowances, point of purchase displays, and other promotional tools, designed to motivate distributors, and retailers to carry a product. We were to come up with two examples of each and discuss whether they were effective or not. Also in the discussion I will briefly describe the promotional tool being used; example might be a coupon. First we are going to discuss consumer oriented sales promotion.

As I have said before consumer oriented sales promotion specifically target consumers in order to get them to buy a product, to create the sale. There are many tools that are used by companies that target consumers.

My first promotional tool is a coupon on the side of a Kellogg Special K cereal box. This coupon allows the consumer to use this coupon to save $1 on the next time they buy a box of any one package of Special K Protein Meal bars or any one package of Kellogg Special K cereal. The purpose of this coupon is to get the consumer to continue to buy set Kellogg products and save some money each time they buy. I find that a coupon like this can be very effective especial to those who buy kellogg products. There are many cereals that are made by kellogg and having a coupon can add great value and save you time and money when you go to the store. Consumers like to save money at any chance they can get. In today's economy everyone is feeling the effects of mass unemployment and money is tight for many. Cereal is the most important meal and parents know that having a good breakfast helps keep balance and keeps them alert and focused. I also found another coupon card that you can use to save 20% on anything in the store for Kohls.

Consumers can find great value in using this if they regularly go to Kohls to shop there. Again the purpose is to help the consumer save money to keep them coming back. However, this coupon is only handed out to their most valued customers. I am not sure how they determine who their most valued customers are but if I were to take a guess they probably base it on how much in a year you spend at Kohls. So I don't think that this would be effective is as the other coupon because it is only giving to a limited number of people and plus there is no way of really measuring the the responses of the consumer.

Now that we have talked about consumer oriented promotional sales. We will now go into trade-oriented promotional sales. We know that involves finding incentive for a retailer or a distributor to carry a product. I choose the wrangler advertisement where bret farve advertises for Wrangler. Purpose of the ad is to have retailers carry the Wrangler jean brand. They use Bret Farve to promote the product because he is a star quarterback in the NFL. Not sure that this would be very effective to convince a retailer to necessarily carry the brand. Wrangler is one brand of popular jeans and we can all agree that a famous celebrity or in this case of professional football player does create more of an appeal. Trade oriented promotional sales is more difficult in the sense it is trying to convince a retailer or a distributor to carry a product and prove that it will do well as far as sales and that there will be a high enough demand to offset the cost of advertising it and placement in stores. The last trade-oriented sales promotion will be a promotion by fleet farm everyday low prices on almost all their products and this example they offer 17.99, and it looks like on the sign they are advertising coil wire heater. I think Everyday Low Price depends heavily on promotions to attract consumers. This is not effective for marketers trying to build market share. When the trade companies see this sales promotion, they could think the products are not high quality.I believe that the wrangler advertisement was more effective because of mainly a NFL quarterback in the ad. Also Wrangler jeans is one of a few popular jeans and when people think of comfortable jeans they think of wrangler.
A final note we discussed both types of sales promotions; consumer oriented and trade oriented sales promotion. We found two example of both and discussed both and and how effective they were. Sales promotion is an important component of marketing and without promotion much like advertising consumers would not be aware of the product.

Corporate blogs

In this blog we are discussing corporate blogs. We have mentioned that blogs are web-based publications consisting primarily of periodic articles, normally presented in reverse chronological order. We have to find two corporate blogs and discuss them which includes the purpose of the blog and the value of these blogs bring the organization that created them. The first blog I have as an example is GE. The link to this blog is the following: http://ge.geglobalresearch.com/blog/. The purpose of this blog is to make people of aware of break through in medicine. This brings tremendous value to the organization because as he population continues to age and diseases such as cancer continue to take lives doctors are looking for such advancements in medicine to cure this disease. For people reading this they may want to share this with family members or friends. They may know someone who is suffering from some chronic illness and having some knowledge of some advancement is good news. They may want to inquiry more information about the advancement.

My second blog is on IBM. IBM is a major manufacturer of computer chips but in recent years have changed their focus on building a a smarter planet. They create solutions for every day problems is their mission. These people are called IMBers. The link to this blog is the following: http://falakah.blogspot.com. The purpose of this blog is again creating solutions to everyday problems. Problems such as counterfeit drugs making their way onto store shelves. They created smart tags so they can monitor the process from the manufacturing of the drugs to their distribution. They want to create a smarter planet and reduce waste and be more environmentally friendly. This maybe be very helpful to the company that creates this blog because of many issues such as food shortages, more demand for resources such as fuel we need to find ways to conserve our scarce resources. People may be interested in the ways companies are trying to make our lives better so they may be more inclined to read into it more and get more information. Blogs as you can see can be very helpful to companies to distribute their ideas to the general public and to specifically target demographic groups to distribute their ideas. We look to the future as blogs to be a very important medium to get ideas out to potential customers.