Stage-3: The Promotional Mode

Injunction: Promote!

Businesses must truly believe in their products, recognize that advertising requires focus and sacrifice and ensure persuasion is positive and backed by product quality. All these qualities emerge by activating the Cause-centred system.

Review the Background

(a) Cause-centred mentality.
(b) Cause-centred principles in a career development context.

Whatever complaints are made about advertising techniques, customers do need appropriate promotional communications from firms to discover the extent and merits of what is on offer—the difficulty for businesses lies in being «appropriate».

Note that promotion involves two distinct areas of choice: what product features count, and which likely prospects might be converted into paying customers.

Success depends on:

• Describing and defining products so as to add appeal.
• Analysing behaviours and preferences of prospective customers.
• Advertising that gets the message, the medium and the timing right.
• Crusading so as to be immediately recognizable by customers.
• Creating brands and sticking to the brand identity.
• Organising so as to close sales easily.
• Measuring the effectiveness of communications.
• Evaluating the strategic impact of marketing efforts.
  

Q: Is promotion product-centric? or market-centric? Or both?

A:  Work it out—then check your answer.

Developmental Stimulus

Effective promotion attracts customers, but it alone cannot ensure they stay, to generate a stable base of support for the business. And without a stable base of customer support, any business is vulnerable.

A stable dependable customer base only develops on a mutual or reciprocal basis. Promotional hype and clever sales talk aside, customers must get something worthwhile at the right price (i.e. value for money). Mutuality? Reciprocity? Value? That’s Community-centred territory.

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• Proceed to Stage-4: The Reciprocity Mode.

Originally posted: July 2009