Feature: Sales promotion evolves with digital

Victoria White, head of activation at activationtmw, the promotional and experiential arm of Tullo Marshall Warren, looks at digital sales promotion – a new media landscape that is turning heads and driving response

Over the years, sales promotion has evolved from a purely tactical piece of “down and dirty” marketing activity to being viewed as a tool within a fully integrated marketing plan. The discipline now plays a key role within the marketing mix with its ability to create a strong consumer interruption in a variety of channels and provide the trigger point for a consumer to choose brand A over brand B. The arrival of the digital revolution has enabled sales promotion to evolve further and has introduced an element of flexibility not previously possible.

As recently as five years ago, sales promotion had its feet firmly offline, with on-pack offers, in-store promotions and roadshows – and clearly these traditional SP tools are still very important. The challenge however is that they tend to result in big, static, one-off activity – great at driving a consumer response, but not so good at maintaining an ongoing relationship.

As successful as these promotions might be, limitations are always there. Setting up and participating in a big sales promotion mechanic is time-consuming for all involved – from the brand to retail and, of course, participants.

A high level of involvement from a brand and its agency is always necessary – from the initial planning and set-up, to selling the activity into retail, overseeing redemptions and rewarding any winners. This generally means that big, stand-alone promotions, while having a huge impact at the time they go out, only tend to happen once or twice a year, with large budgets required. And the long lead times made it difficult to pull activity or alter it if circumstances change.

For example, if early results for a promotion don’t look as strong as expected, not much can be done to change its mechanics. Also, if a brand has a big offline brand promotion centred around, say, a celebrity who has taken a bit of a fall from grace, it can do more to damage the brand than enhance it – but a brand would have had little control over this.

For a retailer/supplier, these large promotions have always required a lot of support – deciding how the promotional product is going to be stocked, rearrangement of floor plans, briefing of staff etc. With the increasing power that retailers enjoy these days, this necessary retail support has been harder and harder to secure as they have become increasingly reluctant to become involved, preferring to focus on their own promotions.

And we can’t forget the consumer – it took effort for them to enter a big offline promotion. They had to fill in the form, find a stamp and send it off, or take something additional home in their shopping basket. With more people shopping online and also the increasing speed at which we live our lives, “old school” SP activity can sometimes not be a perfect fit with today’s consumer.

With the arrival of digital, creating a brand new channel for all marketers, this has changed. It has provided the ability to reach consumers in new ways and new places via a channel increasingly relevant to consumers’ lifestyles. Within sales promotion, it has had a two-fold impact.

Firstly, it has enhanced traditional promotional mechanics. Big, stand-alone pieces of activity will still take place, but the arrival of digital allows us to enhance certain elements. This has had a particular impact on consumers – how much easier is it to text or email in to enter? In addition, marketers can now can easily test and quickly change promotions if needs be, and promotions are easier to set up and manage.

A quick tour of promotions currently in-store shows how these digital entry mechanics have been adopted – it can be seen in use on Maltesers’ “Win a holiday every year for life” and Coca-Cola’s “They Score, You Score” and “Win Movie Tickets”. It is a technique that Walkers also use regularly – “Win an iPod every 5 minutes” could not have taken place without a digital entry mechanic.

Digital channels have also been able to bring a fresh approach to running promotions and have enabled new types of promotional activity. Again, currently in-store, is Doritos “Your Ad on TV”. This invites consumers to make their own Doritos TV ad and post it on the Doritos website. A winner is then chosen via a combination of consumer votes and an expert judging panel. Although a fairly commonplace mechanic now, it is easy to forget that this sort of promotion would never be able to take place without the digital channels we take for granted nowadays.

Of course, as great as the digital channel is, it does still come with some limitations. The increase of social media and resulting word-of-mouth element of the internet can lead to a brand losing control. Remember the Threshers voucher promotion which snowballed as people posted them on the Web and sent them onto friends, leading to a significantly higher level of redemption than planned for – and not necessarily from people the promotion was targeted at?

However, the speed of web evolution means that this is less of an issue now. Digital channels are also unable to provide a tangible presence, for instance within retail, which promotions can need to fulfil objectives.

So, what does all this mean for sales promotion? You could argue that digital is just another channel, which should be used to communicate a sales promotion when appropriate. However, it is such a unique channel that I see it as a way of allowing us to evolve to what I call “Sales Promotion Plus” – making promotions work harder than ever before.

Although there will always be room and value in those big one-off promotions, sales promotion marketers can now use digital as a tool to integrate promotions more closely with other marketing activity. This means that it can serve as an entry point into an ongoing relationship with a brand, rather than just a one-off “hit”. The interactivity of digital channels has made it possible for a digital sales promotion to really build additional engagement with customers for the long term.

Coca-Cola has really got a handle on this and last year’s Diet Coke “Win the ultimate £10,000 Diet Coke break” is a good example. Entry via the web takes you to a site where you can view the TV ad, take part in third-party offers and see detail about the different types of city breaks on offer – as well as entering to win. At the same time, Benetton was also offering trips to Florence as a competition prize – communicated via a window poster and counter card in-store. How much more of a brand interaction are you able to create via the use of a website within the promotion?

In addition, sales promotion can now be more accountable than ever before, enabling us to develop ongoing activity that we can also measure, providing an understanding of who responds to what, and giving us real learnings that we can use to help develop even better promotions in the future.

Before the digital revolution, some people were starting to talk about the decline of sales promotion. However, post-revolution, the future has never looked so rosy. Sales promotion is now the ultimate tool for gaining customer attention in an increasingly complex media environment, with the added strength of then also driving response. As the economic climate becomes colder, “Sales Promotion Plus”, with its built-in flexibility, speed and accountability, along with its ability to drive long-term customer relationships, has the ability to turn more client heads – and help them to maximise the impact of their marketing budget.