Feature: Sales promotion: Please and close

Please (verb. Cause to feel happy and satisfied. OED.) That’s what promotions have always set out to do and the successful ones have delivered. They have enticed the consumer (for which also read customer) by offering something pleasing over and above the intrinsic benefits of the product or service they are promoting. Perhaps more importantly they have satisfied the consumer and genuinely rewarded her or him for engaging with the brand.

But now consider this: Please (adverb. Used in polite requests. To agree to accept an offer. To add urgency and emotion to a request. OED). We all know that the days of hectoring consumers are long gone and unlamented. Now, more than ever, the consumer is king (or queen). Monarchs of the media. Controlling their own portals to their conscious or unconscious buying decisions. Switching off mentally and physically when the message fails to engage them. Google overtaking ITV UK ad revenue was a milestone on a one-way street. There’s no going back. Permission marketing is here to stay.

The consumer’s ability to reject ad messages and promotional blandishments is now paramount. That means that promotions need not only to seduce as never before, but they need to deliver impeccably against their promise or risk irretrievable damage to the reputation (and thus critically the brand equity) of the promoting brand.

Now take another word: Close. Two pronunciations with different meanings. Close, with the sibilant voiced (verb. Bring a transaction to a conclusion. OED). “Advertising proposes, sales promotion closes” was a popular aphorism in days of yore, when the two marketing disciplines were mistakenly seen as being in competition with one another. But this pithy observation still contains more than a grain of truth. Promotion’s role remains one of closing the sale. Adding that little appealing extra benefit that nudges into action consumers who are already persuaded of the brand’s attributes. The key difference between intention to buy and actually buying.

Which brings us to Close, with the sibilant unvoiced (adj. Near to or done in careful and thorough way. OED). Promotion works because it is attainably close to the consumer. Often it is immediate, hopefully it is appealing and undemanding in its simplicity. “Here I am, take me, I’m free.” But is it, and here comes the homily, always done in a careful and thorough way? In the world of permission marketing, this becomes more pertinent than ever before. If I allow you to get close to me, to engage with me, I do not expect to be disappointed. Just think how much worse the Hoover holiday fiasco of the 80s would have been in today’s blog-crazy cyberworld.

Today if a promotion fails to deliver, you don’t just grumble to a few friends, you blog it to everyone. Then the tabloids pick it up and ram it home relentlessly with that destructive venom they so evidently relish. Just consider the probably irreparable damage done to the reputations of the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 by the recent phone-in/competition scandal (which, incidentally, many promotions professionals knew was a mega-disaster just waiting to happen). Breaking trust with your consumers is unforgivable. You are far more likely to alienate your consumers with a bad promotion than you ever will with bad advertising.

So if today’s promoters want to please and close, they must use true professionals to ensure not only that their promotions are effective, but also that they are legal, they conform to the codes, they use the media to best advantage and they deliver what they say on the tin. Therein lies the promise of contented consumers and increased sales.

So, dear respected and valued promoters, just as you wouldn’t use an unqualified lawyer to defend you in court, an unqualified accountant to prepare your annual accounts or an unqualified architect to design your new building, please think long and hard about using plausible but unqualified generalists to create and manage your promotions. Therein potentially lies the threat of disenchanted consumers and career-threateningly negative publicity.

Just a final related thought: Do not let yourselves be sweet-talked into believing that “the medium is the message”. This is and always was a load of old tosh. More than ever in a converged world, content still rules OK. Of course insightful media selection is vital and those with the expertise to provide it should be rightly valued, not least because they are legally responsible for its content as principals at law, but in promotion as in advertising, it’s the message that counts in the final analysis…and always will!

And now, if you please, I’ll close.

John Hooper CBE is an honorary fellow and past chairman of the Marketing Society, a former director general of the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA) and a member of Ofcom’s Advisory Committee for England.