Personal Selling
The final element of an organization's promotional mix is personal selling, a form of person-to-person communication in which a seller attempts to assist and/or persuade prospective buyers to purchase the company's product or service or to act on an idea. Unlike advertising, personal selling involves direct contact between buyer and seller, either face-to-face or through some form of telecommunications such as telephone sales. This interaction gives the marketer communication flexibility; the seller can see
- Exhibit 1-14 Advertising is often used to enhance companies' corporate images
or hear the potential buyer's reactions and modify the message accordingly. The personal, individualized communication in personal selling allows the seller to tailor the message to the customer's specific needs or situation.
Personal selling also involves more immediate and precise feedback because the impact of the sales presentation can generally be assessed from the customer's reactions. If the feedback is unfavorable, the salesperson can modify the message. Personal selling efforts can also be targeted to specific markets and customer types that are the best prospects for the company's product or service.
Promotional Management
Exhibit 1-15 Business-to-business marketers such as Honeywell use advertising to build awareness
Exhibit 1-15 Business-to-business marketers such as Honeywell use advertising to build awareness

In developing an integrated marketing communications strategy, a company combines the promotional-mix elements, balancing the strengths and weaknesses of each, to produce an effective promotional campaign. Promotional management involves coordinating the promotional-mix elements to develop a controlled, integrated program of effective marketing communications. The marketer must consider which promotional tools to use and how to combine them to achieve its marketing and promotional objectives. Companies also face the task of distributing the total promotional budget across the promotional-mix elements. What percentage of the budget should they allocate to advertising, sales promotion, the Internet, direct marketing, and personal selling?
Companies consider many factors in developing their IMC programs, including the type of product, the target market, the buyer's decision process, the stage of the product life cycle, and the channels of distribution. Companies selling consumer products and services generally rely on advertising through mass media to communicate with ultimate consumers. Business-to-business marketers, who generally sell expensive, risky, and often complex products and services, more often use personal selling. Business-to-business marketers such as Honeywell do use advertising to perform important functions such as building awareness of the company and its products, generating leads for the sales force, and reassuring customers about the purchase they have made (see Exhibit 1-15).
Conversely, personal selling also plays an important role in consumer-product marketing. A consumer-goods company retains a sales force to call on marketing intermediaries (wholesalers and retailers) that distribute the product or service to the final consumer. While the company sales reps do not communicate with the ultimate consumer, they make an important contribution to the marketing effort by gaining new distribution outlets for the company's product, securing shelf position and space for the brand, informing retailers about advertising and promotion efforts to users, and encouraging dealers to merchandise and promote the brand at the local market level.
Advertising and personal-selling efforts vary depending on the type of market being sought, and even firms in the same industry may differ in the allocation of their promotional efforts. For example, in the cosmetics industry, Avon and Mary Kay Cosmetics concentrate on direct selling, whereas Revlon and Max Factor rely heavily on consumer advertising. Firms also differ in the relative emphasis they place on advertising and sales promotion. Companies selling high-quality brands use advertising to convince consumers of their superiority, justify their higher prices, and maintain their image. Brands of lower quality, or those that are hard to differentiate, often compete more on a price or "value for the money" basis and may rely more on sales promotion to the trade and/or to consumers.
The marketing communications program of an organization is generally developed with a specific purpose in mind and is the end product of a detailed marketing and promotional planning process. We will now look at a model of the promotional planning process that shows the sequence of decisions made in developing and implementing the IMC program.
As with any business function, planning plays a fundamen- The IMC Planning PrOCeSS tal role in the development and implementation of an effective promotional program. The individuals involved in promotion design a promotional plan that provides the framework for developing, implementing, and controlling the organization's integrated marketing communications programs and activities. Promotional planners must decide on the role and function of the specific elements of the promotional mix, develop strategies for each element, and implement the plan. Promotion is but one part of, and must be integrated into, the overall marketing plan and program.
A model of the IMC planning process is shown in Figure 1-4. The remainder of this chapter presents a brief overview of the various steps involved in this process.
Continue reading here: Review of the Marketing Plan
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