SALES PROMOTION

                 SALES PROMOTION

         Sales promotion techniques were firstly used in the year 1930, when the global recession started from the United States of America. It was the time of transformation of “Sellers Market” into the “Buyers’ Market” at the global level. In order to wipe out the pilling stocks or goods in the warehouse the marketers used in the technique to lure or induce the customers to buy their products.

           Sales promotion is one of the four aspects of promotion i.e. advertising, personal selling, and publicity/ public relation. Sales promotion are specific efforts that are designed to have an immediate impact on sales. Sales promotion refers to many kinds of incentives and techniques directed toward consumers and traders with the intention to produce immediate or short-term sales effects. Whereas advertising offer a reason to buy, sales promotion offers an incentive to buy. Sales promotion collectively comprises of the tools used to promote sales. These are primarily short-term in nature and are designed to quickly stimulate sales. Advertising creates awareness whereas sales promotion induces to buy the product. Sales promotion material act as a direct inducement, offering added value, or incentive for the product, to re-sellers, sales person or consumers. Sales promotions are designed for immediate increase in product sales. For example Buy One Get One Free, couponing, money-off promotion, competition, free accessories, introductory offers ( such as buy digital TV and get free installment), and so on.

           Advertising Marketing Association defines it as: “In a specific sense, sales promotion includes those sales activities that supplement both personal selling and advertising and coordinate them and help to make them effective such as displays, shows and expositions, demonstrate and other non-recurrent selling efforts not used in the ordinary routine.” Sales promotion act as a direct inducement, offering added value, or incentive for the product, to re-sellers, sales person or consumers. According to Professor Philip Kotler, “Sales promotion consists of a diverse collection of incentive tools, mostly short-term, designed to stimulate quicker and/or greater purchase of particular products/services by consumers or the trade.”

           In the words of G.W. Hopkins “Sales promotion is an organised effort applied to the selling job to secure the greatest effectiveness for advertising and for dealers’ help.” According to Institute of Sales Promotion, UK “Sales promotion comprises that range of techniques used to attain sales/ marketing objective in a cost effective manner by adding value to a product or service either to intermediaries or end users, normally but not exclusively within a defined period.”

In the words of Harold Whitehead, ‘Sales promotion includes the dissemination of information to wholesalers, retailers, customer-actual and potential, and not least to the firms own salesman.” L.K. Johnson is of the view that “Sales promotion consist of all those activities the efforts of the sales force, of the advertising department, and of the distributors and increase sales and otherwise stimulate consumers to take greater initiative in buying.” According to W.J. Stanton, “Sales promotion as demand stimulating devices designed to supplement advertising and facilitate personal selling.”

On the basis of above views suppressed by eminent marketing specialized sales promotion can be define as:

(1) In a narrow sense sales promotion includes those activities which helps in personal selling.

(2) In a broad sense sales promotion includes all those activities which helps in increasing sale i.e. advertising, personal selling, product innovations, improvement in marketing systems and special promotional schemes.

(3) In a specific sense sales promotion is an irregular activities used to promote sale excluding advertising, personal selling and publicity.

According to Totten and Block, “The term sales promotion refers to many kinds of selling incentives and techniques intended to produce immediate or short-term sales effects. Typical sales promotion include coupons, samples, in-pack, premium, self-liquidating premium, value-packs, refund and rebates, price-off packs, contest, sweepstakes, trade shows, continuity plans others. Sales promotion techniques can be applied across a broad range of product – from chewing gum to houses and cars. Perhaps the only unifying theme among these various methods is that they all must be communicated to the appropriate audience to be effective.

So we can summaries that sales promotion is very important tool of marketing which includes sample, coupons, cash refund offers, price off, premiums, prizes, free trials, warranties, tie-in promotion, point-of-purchase displays, and demonstration for consumer promotion; price off, advertising and display allowances, for trade promotion is new accepted by management as an effective sales tool.

         According to professor Philip Kotler sales promotion tools have three distinctive characteristics:

(1) Communication: They gain attention and provide information to consumer about to the product.

(2) Incentive: They incorporate some concession, inducement that provides value to the consumer.

(3) Invitation: It provides distinct invitation to customers to go for transactions.