Promotional Incentives

Companies thrive on promotion. Most companies have their people on staff whose soul purpose is to crate promotions and promotional rewards.

These promotional rewards are similar to customer incentives in that they are trying to sell products to both new and loyal customer. But unlike some incentive programs which can sometimes take weeks, months, and in some cases even years to implement promotional incentives are designed to give a product an immediate boost in sales.

Grocery stores are probably the best example of an ongoing promotional incentive program. On Saturday’s they open their doors to food distributors who haul in tables, chairs, and boxes of toothpicks. These food hawkers set up mini stations in the middle of the aisle ways, and beam proudly as they hand out free samples of food.

The same grocery stores will set up points of purchase displays in the middle of the store promoting some item or other. They pin nutritional fact sheets to the displays and tuck little pamphlets containing recipes that use the promoted item. Theses little recipes always have the words, free, please take one, blazed across their gleaming covers.

The Sunday papers are full of coupons offering special buy one get one free deals that expire weeks later.

Hair products, shampoos and conditioners, like to offer free samples. They normally fasten tiny little bottles of a new product to the larger bottles of the tried and true product.

You normally don’t see a happy go lucky person standing in the middle of the local electronics store, offering little pieces of keyboards to customers to sample before you decide to buy the computer. Nor do you normally buy a package of blank CD’s and find a minuscule I-pod taped to the wrappers. Some promotions simply don’t work with some items. The electronic field likes to run their promotions in the form of rebates. When dealing with a rebate a customer pays full price for a product. Once they get it home they mail a rebate sticker and a copy of their receipt to the manufactures. The manufacture then mails a check for a predetermined amount. Most rebates have expiration dates so it’s important to mail them in as soon as possible.

Credit card companies often run promotional signing specials to encourage customers to apply for a credit card. These specials might be, guaranteed approval, no interest rate for the first few months of service, free theft protection, or a second card free.

Companies will often give an incentive so the customer doesn’t notice the high price of the product. Customers are so happy to be getting something for free they don’t always stop to consider how much they are spending on the product. Cell phones companies do this a lot. Customers are often so excited about the free phone they don’t notice how much they are spending activating the “free phone.” This is the type of promotional incentive that is often dubbed a gimmick.

Promotional incentives are easier to come by in some parts of the world. In some countries there are strict regulations on the way promotions can be run.

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