AN APPRAISAL OF SALES PROMOTION ON THE CHOICE OF MOBILE PHONE OPERATORS

CHAPTER ONE

1.0            INTRODUCTION

The success of any firm largely depends on customers patronage, for any firm to push its products to the consumers effectively, there is the need to carryout promotional campaigns to communicate with the ultimate consumers without promotion, customers may not be aware of the existence of the particular product, hence patronage may remain very low. Many promotional tools are used to communicate with the consumers but sales promotion tends to be the most effective of all due to the extra incentive it provides to consumers.

Alexandra (1960) viewed sales promotion“as a marketing activity other than personal selling, advertising, public and public relations that induces and stimulates consumers purchase and dealers effectiveness”. The importance of sales promotion campaigns   are seen at the point of purchase where it is used to support personal selling and advertising, it is rarely used alone as a promotional tool. In marketing practice, the application of all promotion tools is called promotional mix.

Sales promotion as an effective promotional tool tends to serve “as direct inducement that to offers an extra, values or incentives on the product to the sales force, distributors and the ultimate consumers with the primary objective of creating an immediate sale”. Sales promotion tends to act as an a acceleration tool designed to speed up the selling process and maximizes sales volume through increasing market share. The acceleration tool motivates consumers to purchase a larger quantity of a brand and it also shorten the purchase cycle of the trade and consumers by encouraging them to take more immediate actions.

As the use of sales promotion increase, companies now started considering what they hope to accomplish through their promotional campaigns because not all sales promotion campaigns are designed to achieve the same goals, marketers must plan sales promotion programmes by carrying out situation analysis, to determine sales promotion target audience. Marketing manager must think beyond short term sales while the basic goal of most consumers sales promotion is to induce consumers purchase, and marketer objective could be to defend current market share, increase consumption through enhanced marketing efforts.

1.1    STATEMENT OF GENERAL PROBLEMS

Sales promotion campaign is an effective means of communicating with the target market by providing extra incentive to buy. Sales promotion activities are designed by firms in achieving their organizational objectives. But In spite of the achievements there are some problems faced by these firms during the campaigns.

The increasing uses of sales promotion in firm’s marketing programmes is getting too strong for them to handle because it  is a fundamental change in strategic decisions on how these trims sell their products to consumers. The increasing sales promotion campaigns have been questioned by many marketing scholars particularly with regards to lack of adequate planning and management of sales promotion programmes.

Also, research and literatures have shown that over-dependence on sales promotion by many companies have resulted to sales promotion trap. This is because many firms use sales promotion campaigns extensively to differentiate their products from competitors products which has consequently resulted in reduction in profit margin of the competing firms.

Many firms fall into trap due to success of the sales promotion campaigns  which eventually lead to differential advantage that attracts other firms  to copy.

Finally, lack of media timing and support for sales promotion campaigns which is very critical and should be coordinated with the media programmes on advertising campaigns. Sales promotion without media advertising could render the campaign ineffective because consumers need to be informed about the promotional offers to stimulate their interest and favourable attitude towards the brand.

1.2     BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

It is obvious that companies can not connect all customers in large broad or diverse market and as a result of the needs to divide market in to group of consumer or segments with distinct needs and wants. It therefore becomes paramount for a company to identify which market segment to serve better. Before the objective can be achieved, it is required that a keen understanding of consumer behaviour and careful strategic thinking. To develop the best marketing planning, managers need to understand what makes each segment unique and different. Modern marketers in their quest to study consumer behaboviour and responses to benefit offer by the product for example do people want quantity rather than low price. In an attempt to increase benefit to consumers, this will aid marketers to know how best to satisfy each category of these customers. It required a keen understanding of consumers’ behaviour and careful strategic thinking.

The over all intent is to identify groups of similar customers and potentials customers to prioritize the groups to address to understand their behaviour and to respond with appropriate marketing strategic that satisfy the different performance of each choosen division and thereby improve the company revenue. This can however be achieved through a distinct division of groups of buyers who might requires separate product and for marketing mix known as market segmentation.

According to Michael Porter (1970 P:37) with the right segmentation, the right list can be purchased advertising results can be improved and customer satisfaction can be increased leading to better reputation

Nelson (1984 page 125) explain that united states in the 18 century provides a broad segmentation of the population of their country based statistical analysis of house hold and geo-demogrpahic data. The recent times market has been divided based on the number of general criteria. Such as industrial or public versus private, although industrial market segmentation is quite different from consumer market segmentation but both have similar objectives. Regardless of which type of segmentation a marketer uses, the secret behind the marketing programmes recognize customer differences and efficiently highlight the differences to offer maximum satisfaction to every division.

1.3            OBJECTIVE OF THE STUDIES

This research work is on an appraisal of the impact of sales promotion on the choice of mobile phone service providers specifically aimed at achieving the following specific objectives.

-      To find out the impact of sales promotion in the organization

-      To investigate how sales promotion could be used in building image and good will for the organization.

-      To investigate how sales could be lifted substantially through effective targeting and reward system.

-      To enhance market dominance of the company’s products.

-      To make recommendations on how to improve marketing performance of the company through sales promotion.