Week 10

In week 10 we were introduced to yet another mix, the Promotional Mix. This mix is made up of four parts; advertising, sales promotion, personal selling, and public relations. Advertising deals with any form of one-way communication that is paid for by a firm or person. This is what consumers will often use to form opinions and bias towards a firm. Sales promotion refers to methods to increase consumer purchases over a short period of time such as a discount. Personal selling refers to a purchase situation that results from a personal, paid-for communication geared towards a member of the target market. Finally, public relations is the task of building a positive image for the company that supports the goals of the firm. The promotional mix can be seen in full gear from Amazon. Amazon has become a conglomerate due to their ability to incorporate the promotional mix into their business model. They have invested huge chunks of money into both algorithms to advertise specific goods to a consumer as well as creating an amazing PR department. If there is ever an issue with a sold product, Amazon more often than not will absorb the loss and send a new and hopefully functional version of the good out to the user.

Although we know what the Promotional Mix is, I have not explained properly what are the goals of this mix. These goals are informing, persuading, and reminding. Informing is the concept of converting a consumer's need into interest to one of the firm's products. This is the idea of converting what is simply a "Bug" into an actual want rather than a frustration. The second goal is Persuading. Persuading is the idea of convincing a consumer to actually leave their current preferred brand in order to attract them towards your own firm. The firm will have to be able to one up the competing firms in order to attract existing customers in the market to their firm. Reminding is applied by advertisements and promotions in order to trigger a reminder that the consumer should purchase the product. Reminding can be simply a reminder to initiate a purchase or to reinforce the benefits of the good in order to inspire one to purchase the good once more. HydroFit is entering a preexisting market in terms of hydration devices and more specifically smart bottles. A large portion of our time if we were to try to attract customers would be persuading. Statistically there are a larger number of users who already own or use water bottles than there is not. We simply have to show that our benefits provide greater utility than our competitors.

Finally we will discuss the three sources of media that can be deployed. These three are owned, earned, and paid. Owned media is made up blogs, social media, and other platforms that provide information to the general public that the firm has complete control over. Earned media is content that is shared by word of mouth or online sharing that is free to the firm. The third is paid media which can be pay per click, advertisements, promoted content, or anything that is paid for by the firm. A firm will typically want to start with owned media because it is cheap to maintain as well as the fact that they have complete control over the information being displayed. This way it is easiest to maintain and improve a brand image. Next, firms will try to create earned media since it is free. Lastly, they will use paid media if owned and earned medias are not promoting their product or brand great enough.

One thing I would like to learn more about is how we should use the three sources of media for our own product. How easy will it be to create owned and earned media?

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