Promotion Mix (marketing communication mix): A company’s total promotion mix—also called its marketing communication mix—consists of the specific blend of advertising, sales promotion, public relations, personal selling and direct marketing tools that the company uses to persuasively communicate customer value and build customer relationships.
1. Advertising: Advertising is any paid form of nonpersonal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods, or services by an identified person.
2. Sales promotion: Sales promotion is a short term incentives to encourage the purchase or sale of a product or service. Samples, coupons, refunds, premiums,and point-of-purchase displays to contests, sweepstakes, and event sponsorships.
3. 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 rumors, stories and events. Public relations is very believable— news stories, features, sponsorships, and events seem more real and believable to readers than ads do.
4. Personal selling: Personal selling is a personal presentation by the firm’s sales force for the purpose of making sales and building customer relationships.
5. Direct marketing: Direct marketing is a direct connections with carefully targeted individual consumers to both obtain an immediate response and cultivate lasting customer relationships—the use of direct mail, the telephone, direct-response television, e-mail, the internet and other tools to communicate directly with specific consumers.
