Student Corner - 252
Having seen some important tools of
promotion for the consumers, now we move on to the tools of trade promotion.
Let us recall here that Sales Promotion is usually discussed under three heads:
Consumer Promotion, Trade Promotion and Sales Force Promotion. For any business we know consumers are
primary in the sense they make the business possible and sustainable. Consumers
cannot exist per se in vacuum; the business context makes it possible for the
consumers to be. Now for the consumers
and the business to continue in existence, they need as a matter of fact the
sales force which in effect bridge the consumers with the business or vice
versa . Now we move on to the second
component of Sales Promotion; that is, Trade Promotion.
In fact, management experts point out
that in the budget allocation, a huge chunk, a lion’s share, goes to Trade
Promotion because it is the ground where consumers and sales force meet for all
practical purposes. Almost all marketing activities fall under trade promotion.
Businesses are carried out in various forms like retail selling, inviting
stockists, minor and mega, so on. In other words, manufacturers, the origin of
business concern, and the retailers, the last but one destination for the
products manufactured, meet in the form of Trade.
Some of the most popular tools of Trade
Promotion are Display, Demonstration, Gifts, Bonuses. Let us spend some time on
each of the tools. Usually, retail shops exploit Display. Though Display helps
attract the attention of the customer to the products, the place where Display
happens is also important, rather somewhat more important. All retail shops
will have aisles, that is, rows of shelves stacked with products of almost all
popular categories like biscuits, cosmetics, beverages so on. And there will be
a payment-counter where you pay for the products you have chosen for billing.
You could have seen just near the payment counter some displays in a convenient
structure, that is, not regular rakes or shelves but smaller structures like
rolling stand or some simple stands with products arranged neatly, possibly in
a good designed way. This place is called Point of Sale Display and this place
is often sold out by the retailer at some cost extra because customers cannot
miss seeing the display and they also see them longer as they stand in queue to
pay. This place is very useful in attracting the attention of the customer.
There are some other kinds of Display features;
we shall see some of them in our next.
