The Promotion Mix

5. The Promotion Mix

Within the fourth "P" — Promotion — a business again has several distinct tools to choose

from and blend together; this blend is called the promotion mix. The main elements are:

1. Advertising — any paid, non-personal form of communication about a product, service, or idea, delivered through a mass medium (television, radio, newspapers, magazines, hoardings, the internet) on behalf of an identified sponsor. Advertising reaches a very large, spread-out audience at a relatively low cost per person reached, but it is impersonal — it cannot answer an individual customer's specific question.
2. Personal Selling — direct, face-to-face (or telephone/video) communication between a salesperson and a prospective customer, aimed at informing, persuading, and closing a sale. Personal selling allows the message to be tailored to each customer and immediate objections to be answered, but it reaches far fewer people per rupee spent than advertising and needs trained sales staff.
3. Sales Promotion — short-term incentives designed to encourage an immediate purchase or trial, such as discounts, coupons, free samples, contests, "buy one get one" offers, or point-of-sale displays. Sales promotion is effective at generating a quick spike in sales but, used too often, can condition customers to wait for the next deal rather than buy at full price.
4. Publicity / Public Relations — non-paid communication about a business or its products, typically carried by the media on its own initiative (a favourable news story, a product review, or coverage of a company's community initiative), or a firm's own planned efforts to build and protect its public image. Because it is not directly paid for and does not read as an obvious advertisement, publicity often carries more credibility with the audience than paid advertising, though the firm has much less control over what is actually said.