What Do Excellent Service Promoters Do Differently?

Abstract

The key finding is that excellent promoters have higher perceptions of the importance of promotion than non-excellent retailers and that they follow up by spending more on the total promotion budget. More specifically, excellent promoters give relatively more emphasis to wide reach promotion tools such as direct mail, print advertising, broadcast advertising and public relations and relatively less emphasis to in-store activities such as personal selling, in-store promotion and price mark-downs. The non-excellent promoters seem to be more preoccupied with price related promotion tools such as in-store promotion and price mark-downs and relatively less occupied with wide reaching promotion tools such as direct mail and broadcast advertising. There is no evidence that non-excellent promoting retailers are failing to contain costs and indeed are just as likely to be minimising costs as the excellent promoters. Rather, the non-excellent promoting retailers seem to be less successful in maximising audience reach for a given promotion budget, that is a productivity measure of promotion effectiveness rather than a cost minimising measure.