MBA in a Nutshell #15 - Marketing : Marketing Mix - Promotion

We are now going to spend a few weeks talking about the last of the 4Ps which is promotion.

There two kinds of broad promotional strategies :

• The Pull strategy employs advertising to get the consumer to want your product and so the demand will cascade from consumer, retailer, wholesaler and manufacturer. 
• The Push strategy works in the opposite direction where selling will be made from the manufacturer to wholesaler, retailer and then to the retailer. 

I doubt that these strategies are mutually exclusive so I expect companies to use a mixture of both. 

Theoretically, I play the role of "manufacturer" with Dr Wealth as my "retailer" but in actual practice I make almost no decisions on promotion. In my case, I doubt any strategy can be categorized this way.

Once a promotional strategy is determined, the next thing to take care of is advertising strategy.

We must first determine what kind of demographic, geographic and impact we want to achieve in our advertising. I struggle with this because I have undergraduates and retirees interested in my program. Generally, in such a case, I will  just target the 80% middle hump in your demographics so largely older Millenials and Gen X for my case.

Finally the metric used in advertising is CPM or Cost per thousand. Simply take the media cost and divide it by units of 1000 members of the audience. A typical CPM is abut $300 for a mailing campaign. Thanks to online marketing, 1000 impressions can be as cheap as $2.80.

I leave this work to my partners who are aces at this, but sometimes I wonder whether paying some money to mainstream media may boost profits.

Probably not worth sacrificing hard earned money on this at the moment.