Brand Development

Understand the constituents of the promotional mix.

1.1    Explain what is meant by promotional mix.

The promotional mix is one of the 4P’s of marketing. The phrase ‘promotional mix’ is used to describe the tools to communicate the product or service to the target market. There are 4 main categories in the promotional mix and those are advertising, public relations, personal selling and sales promotion.

Advertising is any form of one way paid promotional for example TV or radio adverts. Public relations refer to anything which involves building good relations with the audience. Personal selling is when businesses use a sales team to sell the product. Sales promotion is essentially persuading your consumers to buy or try your product, this involves vouchers, POS materials such as posters, loyalty cards, free gifts, giveaways and competitions.

1.2    Assess the suitability of a promotional mix for a product or service.

When marketing a new product or service it is important to think through the 4P’s of marketing – Produce, Place, Price and Promotion, as these can work for all kinds of businesses and allow you to define your new venture. These will help you determine the correct target audience and create a plan for launching the product/service. Once you’ve assessed the 4P’s you will have a better idea of what will be suitable for marketing your product, you will then create the promotional mix using this information. When doing this you will also need to consider the scale of the business, competition, budget, and location. For example if I was creating a promotional mix for The Marketing Café I would look at our target audience and rule out basic advertising tactics such as leafletting round houses as we are a B2B organisation and chances are that would be pointless, and instead possibly look at sending pamphlets to small businesses or organisations.

Understand how to promote a brand to customers.

2.1 Explain the benefits of branding.

Branding is important due to the many benefits it can bring. Branding your business gives it an identity which in turn gives it the ability to be recognised and credited. This is because you then have something which comes to mind and creates a higher level of trust in the consumers eyes and in turn this can help build customer loyalty. It gives your company consistency, attracts talent and boosts client confidence as it is a must to make you look professional.

2.2 Explain ways in which a new business might establish its brand.

With more small businesses now than ever before it is important to know what you’re doing to establish your brand. A good way to do this is to think of your brand as a person when establishing your brand identity and use a consistent tone of voice and ‘personality’ in everything that you do.

2.3 Explain how a business might use an established brand in its promotional mix.

Using an established brand in your promotional mix is a very good way to gain brand awareness. An example of this is one of our clients are launching a new advert on radio and they’ve decided to have a well-known British personality and in turn will make them appear trusted and reputable. Another way this could be done is through a collaboration, one brand who does this often is Dr Marten as they often use artists or smaller businesses such as lazy oaf in order to attract attention and gain a bigger fanbase.