It has been a half way to success for a marketing group as they reach the step of  promotion. They’ve got great product. They’ve had right, easy-reaching target market. All they need to do is just to somehow “motivate” or “impress” customers to see the product and spend money on it. But is it that simple?

I think marketing promotion has three levels.

The lowest level, and probably the simplest one is offering discounting. By cutting down profit per unit, sellers seek to increase the sales volume dramatically and such increase in volume should cover the lost of unit profit. The reason why I think discounting is a method of promotion which is on the lowest level is that sellers in this case have to face a risk of raising the  overall profit. The lost of unit earning might be covered by the increased sales, or it might not. Truly, “It’s on sale” is a quite common saying when management faces problems of promotion; yet there tend to be “smarter” ways.

The middle level, like I saw in another student’s blog https://blogs.ubc.ca/shiyutang/author/shiyutang/, is to deliver some interesting emails or running impressive advertisement towards customers. It could be, like Molly said in her blog, quite eye-catching.(she talked about E-commerce but I think it applied to other marketing strategies as well.) However, I question the response of target costumers as we may not really care about what it says in one of hundreds of junk-mails, under this age of information overabundance.

Promotion is not limited to “sales” only. The highest level of promotion, in my view, should jump beyond this. It could be about building customer relationship by introducing and inviting people to  community activities, spending budget on public welfare advertisement in relative field, or even just telling an interesting story —- about anything. By doing marketing promotion this way, the company is seeking long term development within the industry. And the first thing, they know, is to make customers happy. The following is a great example from Coca-Cola which insight me:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob_blyvSCPg