There was a time when promotion was the short-term tactic marketers drew upon to push the sales needle that extra bit needed to hit a quarterly or annual goal set by the corporate parent. After a big advertising blitz had defined the brand identity and put the product at the top of the consumer's consciousness, a few leftover dollars would be allocated to tip the scale a bit further. Rarely, if ever, consulted about advertising or promotion efforts, most retail buyers would plan inventories around media schedules, with some minor adjustments for P-O-P or couponing that might cause an upward blip in the sales curve.
No more. Retailers — especially the big players like Wal-Mart and Target — dictate marketing practice now, and they are less interested in the consumer's awareness of a specific product and more concerned with getting folks into the stores. This power shift explains in part the migration of marketing dollars over the past few years away from brand-image media advertising and toward in-store entertainment and events provided by promotion marketers.
But, according to former Wal-Mart CMO Paul Higham, promotion marketers still have a way to go if they are to truly partner with major retailers. “Manufacturers depend on short-term promotions. [By contrast] these days, retailers are more likely to do long-term branding,” Higham said last month in a keynote address he delivered in Chicago at PROMO Expo 2003. “Retailers are relationship dependent. [Wal-Mart founder] Sam Walton said, ‘It's about the people, not the sales numbers.’”
Marketers have gotten a lot more savvy about the strategic role integrated promotional marketing can play in branding. Now less enamored with buying time or space in increasingly splintered media, they've emerged from the tactical-only ghetto to which promotions was allocated in years gone by. But Higham, and others operating at his level, have made it clear that the residual short-term thinking still applied to promotion needs to go. Brands and their agency partners need to put more thought and effort into giving their products and promotions “legs” that will help them live longer in the retail environment and especially in the lives of consumers.
