Promotion

Promotion, the fourth element in the marketing mix, is the most difficult one to describe. It is all the communicative activities you use to ensure that customers know about your offerings, have a favorable impression of them, and actually make a transaction. Promotion represents all of the communications that a marketer may insert into the marketplace. These activities include advertising, catalogs, contests, public relations and personal selling. Within these categories we have TV, radio, and print ads, billboards, product placements in movies, sponsorship of public TV and radio channels, two-for-one dinner specials, customer loyalty programs, telemarketing, direct mail sales, and door-to-door solicitations. And on and on.
The many faces of promotion are too numerous to cover in a book of this size. Suffice it to say that, along with market research, promotion provides the critical communication link between your company and the customers you aim to serve.