Promotional Strategies

“How do I get my product/service out there?” This is a question that many people who plan to begin their own businesses, or even larger companies who have already established a name for themselves, frequently ask. Your product or service may be the latest and greatest on the market today, but that doesn't help you if no one knows it exists. You need to find someway to make yourself and your product known.

That is where promotion comes into play. But what exactly is promotion? Well, www.dictionary.com defines promotion as:

The act of promoting or the fact of being promoted; advancement.

Encouragement of the progress, growth, or acceptance of something; furtherance.

Advertising; publicity.

Essentially this covers everything from commercials to magazine ads and even free items given out at exhibitions and trade shows. Promotion is preformed many different ways by many different people but when it all comes down to it there is really only one purpose. To get your name out there.

Now you're probably wondering which kind or promotional strategy would be best for your product, and you would be right to wonder about this. Not every product can be marketed in the same way. Truth be told the promotional strategy is based solely on the product or service. There is no list of defined laws for promotion. The best I can do is give some examples of promotion and explain some points. The rest is really up to you.

For simplicity sake all of my promotional examples are taken from the gaming software aspect of the Information Technology field. More specifically the games programmed for gaming consoles such as the Playstation and GameCube.

To start things off we'll discuss the media aspect of promotion. But just what makes a promotion successful? And how many types of promotions are out there? The Handbook Of Market Segmentation says:

Successful advertising calls for investing your dollars wisely. Advertising expenditures should be allocated to those media vehicles which can best deliver to target markets. Scores of different media can be used. One advertising company claimed that more than 14,000 choices exist. Obviously, most of these media are obscure, impractical, or unimportant. For simplicity, media can be divided into three major classes:

1.Bro...

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... into a promotion for a product that hasn't been completed yet. Nintendo decided the best course of action would be to take shots of what they already have completed, put it to some good sounding dramatic music, just to show viewers what this game will have to offer.

After all of this you have to ask yourself “Is all of this stuff really worth it?”. Most companies would say definitely. Promotional items make sure that people have physical objects to remember your product by, and as for the commercials, well, Alan Bruce said it best in his article “Marking 50 Years Of Memorable TV”:

If the TV medium has reason to celebrate anything lately, it's commercials like these. And industry groups just that marking the 50th anniversary of those ineluctable ads whose history is as memorable – for better or worse – as that of the TV programming itself.

Bibliographies

1.Weinstein, Art. The Handbook of Market Segmentation. New York: The Haworth Press, 2004

2.Bruce, Alan. "Marking 50 Years of Memorable TV The Commercials" Christian Science Monitor. 3 Mar. 1995: Vol: 87, Issue: 67

3.Videos care of www.nintendo.com