Promotion

Promotion mix (Communication Mix): Promotio mix consist of the specific mix of advertising, personal selling, sales promotion, public relations and direct marketing tools a company uses to pursue its advertising and marketing objectives.
That means, the promotio mix has five distinctive tools, these are advertising, personal selling, sales promotion, public relations and direct marketing. They are summarized in below:
• Advertising: Advertising is any paid form of non-personal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods and services by an identified sponsor.
• Personaling selling: Personal selling is the personal presentation by the firm's force for the purpose of making sales and building customer relationships.
• Sales promotion: Sales promotion is a short term incentives to encourage the purchase or sale of a product or service.
• Public relations: Public relations is building good relations with the company's various publics by obtaining favorable publicity, building up a good corporate image and handling or heading off unfavorable quotmss, stoppi and events.
• Direct marketing: Direct marketing is direct communications with carefully targeted individual consumers to obtain an immediate response and cultivate lasting customer relationships through the use of telephone, mail, fax, e-mail, the internet, and other tools to communicate directly with specific customers.
INTEGRATED MARKETING COMMUNICATION
Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC): Integrated Marketing Communication is the concept under which a company carefully integrates and coordinates its many communication channels to deliver a clear, consistent and compelling message about the organization and its product. In another way, integrated marketing communications involves identifying the target audience and shaping a well coordinated promotional program to obtain the desired audience response too often marketing communications focus an immediate awareness, image, or preference goals in the target market. We can show the integrated marketing communication through the below figure:
Advertising ~ Personal Selling
Sales Promotion ~ Public Relations-~Consistent, clear and compelling company and product message
^Direct Marketing^
Figure: Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC)
COMMUNICATION SYSTEM
To communicate effectively, marketers need to understand how communication works. Communication involves the nine element shown in the below figure:
Sender > Encoding > Message* > Decoding > Receiver
^|Feedback < Response <___|
Sender Field of Experience * = (Media
Noise) Reciever Field of Experience
There are nine elements in the above figure and two of those elements are the major parties in a communication, the sender and the reciever. Another two are the major communication tools-the message and the media. Four are major communication functions-encoding, response and feedback. The last element is noise in the system. The definition of these elements is as follows:
• Sender: The party sending the message to another party.
• Encoding: The process of putting thought into symbolic form.
• Message: The set of symbols that the sender transmits.
• Media: The communication channels through which the message moves from sender to reciever.
• Decoding: The process by which the receiver assigns meaning to the symbols encoded by the sender.
• Receiver: The party receiving the message sent by another party.
• Feedback: The part of the receiver's response communicated back the sender.
• Noise: The unplanned static or distortion during the communication process, which results in the receiver's getting a different message than the one the sender sent.
STEPS IN DEVELOPING EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION
• Identify the target audience
• Determine the communication objective
• Design a message
• Choose the media through which to send the message
• Select the message source and
• Collect feedback