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.