Promotional/Marketing Startegy: Learning Guide

Dear students of 3A and 3E,

Greetings from Brisbane!
Our topic now is "Promotional/Marketing Strategy". In this topic we observe how a company of your choice has promoted or marketed their products, say whether it is appropriate, and tell the audience (class) what if other methods of promotion/marketing is employed.

For example:
(In this example, I only talk about promotion.)Case: The Jakarta Post

To promote in Malang market, an English newspaper The Jakarta Post has reduced the price and had newspaper boy at the crossroads (for example at the Dinoyo T-junction (not far from BCA) and ITN crossroad to provide the newspaper every day although only one copy. This type of promotion is call push strategy. [See the description about the strategy later in this guide.] Do you think this is a good strategy? Why? What if the newspaper had chosen another strategy, for example, pull strategy by advertising on Jawa Pos or movie slides at MATOS Movie? Will it be more successful? Why? Then summarize your idea.

To start with, you can do the following:

1. decide the product/company you want to research
2. get the picture of the company logo and the products
3. get the evidence or example of the marketing/promotional materials (by download, taking picture from street billboard, etc.)
4. classify whether the strategy is "pull" or "push" strategy. What are the chracteristics?
5. say whether the strategy is good or not. Why?
6. try to imagine if the company use another strategy. What would it be like? Is it better or worse than the previous one (answer to no. 4 and 5)? Why?

To help you understand push and pull strategy, below is the short article that I cut from
http://tutor2u.net/business/marketing/promotion_pushpull.asp.

Promotion- Push and Pull strategies

"Push or Pull"?
Marketing theory distinguishes between two main kinds of promotional strategy - "push" and "pull". Push A “push” promotional strategy makes use of a company's sales force and trade promotion activities to create consumer demand for a product. The producer promotes the product to wholesalers, the wholesalers promote it to retailers, and the retailers promote it to consumers. A good example of "push" selling is mobile phones, where the major handset manufacturers such as Nokia promote their products via retailers such as Carphone Warehouse. Personal selling and trade promotions are often the most effective promotional tools for companies such as Nokia - for example offering subsidies on the handsets to encourage retailers to sell higher volumes. A "push" strategy tries to sell directly to the consumer, bypassing other distribution channels (e.g. selling insurance or holidays directly). With this type of strategy, consumer promotions and advertising are the most likely promotional tools. Pull A “pull” selling strategy is one that requires high spending on advertising and consumer promotion to build up consumer demand for a product. If the strategy is successful, consumers will ask their retailers for the product, the retailers will ask the wholesalers, and the wholesalers will ask the producers. A good example of a pull is the heavy advertising and promotion of children's’ toys – mainly on television. Consider the recent BBC promotional campaign for its new pre-school programme – the Fimbles. Aimed at two to four-year-olds, 130 episodes of Fimbles have been made and are featured everyday on digital children's channel CBeebies and BBC2. As part of the promotional campaign, the BBC has agreed a deal with toy maker Fisher-Price to market products based on the show, which it hopes will emulate the popularity of the Tweenies. Under the terms of the deal, Fisher-Price will develop, manufacture and distribute a range of Fimbles products including soft, plastic and electronic learning toys for the UK and Ireland. In 2001, BBC Worldwide (the commercial division of the BBC) achieved sales of £90m from its children's brands and properties last year. The demand created from broadcasting of the Fimbles and a major advertising campaign is likely to “pull” demand from children and encourage retailers to stock Fimbles toys in the stores for Christmas 2002.

NOTE: you can use your own way to approach this topic.
Consult further schedules with Pak Bambang.

Thanks and goodluck.

Warmest regards,
Sugeng

Continue

Week 2 Activities

Dear Students,
Our program this semester is strengthening our skills in speaking and writing about marketing in general for the company and product you choose. We have talked about the list of the topics, right?. However, I will post the course outline here for your reference.

COURSE OUTLINE
Purpose
The purpose of this course is to equip the students with the necessary English skills to write and communicate and give presentation on general topics of marketing in English.
The class program consists of class activities, blog project and final report. Below is the description.

I. English for Marketing Class ActivitiesThe class activities would consist of writing exercises and presentation. Writing exercises are done in collaboration with peers and/or teacher on specific topics. The presentation is done based on the writing to the class. For the presentation, Power point presentation is a must. Presentation should be conducted totally in English.

The topics are:

1. Company Introduction (types, products, activities, responsibilities, etc.)
2. Products and prices
3. Consumer segmentation
4. Consumer behavior
5. Promotion/marketing strategies
6. Selling strategies

For each topic, the students shall do at least internet research about a particular company and collect data about the aspects of the company related to the topic. For example, for topic 2, a student may research Unilever (company), and write report about its products and prices. To give a deeper dive, students can write about particular products out of all the products. (The students data and opinion about a particular aspect is to be written in the blog project.) After the report is agreed by the teacher, the students develop a power point presentation to be presented in the class.

By now, I suppose you also have established your small group.

As we have talked about last wee, your blogging task this week is "Introducing Yourself".
And for

For Topic 1 is "Company Introduction", in which we will talk about the company of your choice using the following vocabulary:
- company name
- founder name
- headquarters
- industry
- compony types (PLC, Ltd, Inc, Tbk, etc.)
- corporate culture
- manufacturing industry
- service industry
- share
- share holders
- General Meeting of Share Holders
- boards of commissioners
- board of directors
- assets
- department,
- etc.

As we have finished our discussion on the vocabularies, now this is the time to write up the description of your company of choice in full sentences and arrange them in some paragraphs. Then, give a presentation about it using PowerPoint slides. In the slides, no complete sentence in permitted.
Please start writing a complete post in your own blogs about this topic.Thanks.

Regards,
Sugeng

Continue