What is sales promotion?
Sales promotion is as old as the hills. Who can forget the creation of the first ever sales promotion when God offered Adam a 'Free woman for one rib' deal? With the second ever promotion (on apples), God created promotional terms and conditions which quickly resulted in the first case of mal-redemption when Adam ignored them.

Sales promotion generates sales by using specific strategies which influence the consumer when they are just about to make their purchase decision. Something that advertising (or above the line as it loftily calls itself) can only dream of. At worst these are short term tactical sales drivers, at best they engage the consumer, encourage product trial and influence future behaviour for a long-lasting relationship with the brand. Cool.

Through the use of the right offering, communication and brand-positioning, sales promotion can underpin or enhance the message of ATL and literally bring the personality of a brand to life.

Techniques to choose from
Each method is designed to achieve different things, but they can broadly be categorised as follows:
● Reduce the risk of product trial
● Incentivise product purchase
● Reward repeat purchase

Which one you choose depends, to a greater or lesser degree, on where your product is in it's life cycle.

This is illustrated more succinctly using the career of a D-List celebrity:
● Who is Kerry Katona?
● Get me Karry Katona!
● I want the same as Kerry Katona but cheaper
● Who was Kerry Katona?

Clearly at product launch, you are more likely to want to encourage product trial, whilst appearing to reduce the risk to the consumer.

Reduce the risk of Product Trial
● Free samples
● Satisfaction Guarantee / Comparison / Money back guarantees
● Couponing and introductory discounts

Incentivise product purchase
● Multibuy discount, extra free or straight discount (big yawn and erodes margin)
● Third party discount partners
● Competition prizes
● Gift with purchase
● Self-liquidating promotion*

* It's like a gift with purchase, only the consumer has to pay a contribution which, in theory, covers the cost of the premium if enough are redeemed.

Reward repeat purchase
● Collector scheme

Collect tokens, codes, wrappers etc off pack and redeem on-line, by post or direct to receive a reward. This would take the form of third party offers or cleverly themed premiums.
See the following examples of live collector schemes:
www.brittrips.co.uk
www.thefreerangebutter.co.uk

Legal and above board
The last thing you want to do if you are spending a small fortune on your promotion is to go live and find out that you're on the wrong side of sales promotion law. That's where our good friends at the Institute of Sales Promotion come in. For a modest outlay, they will scour your terms and conditions to cover the UK and beyond, to ensure that your promotion is watertight.

Measure of success
It's all very well launching a promotional campaign, but how are you going to know if it has worked? From the outset you need to decide what you are trying to achieve, how you are going to measure the achievement and what level of achievement would constitute a success. Typically this takes a two-pronged approach - did it achieve it's sales / marketing objective and how many customers did we engage with.

Support the campaign
Coincidentally in these ever more environmentally conscious times, sales promotion is rife with recycled ideas. No offence meant to any creatives out there, but there are very few, if any, new sales promotion ideas. The cleverness lies in how the campaign is themed, the content, the creative, the execution, the experience. This, happily, leaves us with an infinite range of possibilities when we next have a thought shower or brainstorm in good old-fashioned parlance(!)

Which brings me onto the final point. No-one is claiming that Sales Promotion can reinvent the wheel and prevent everyone's sales curves from heading south. Yes, even we at Sales Promotion Blog, acknowledge that Advertising provides valuable support to sales promotion and vice-versa. A straight sales promotion may well produce results, but a strongly supported campaign with a compelling proposition, will really get you noticed.

For advice, suggestions or to discuss your next sales promotion campaign, contact our sister site at Mosaic Marketing & Promotions.