The season has come for every business to roll out its promotional plan for implementation. If you don’t have a plan, please go ahead and prepare one right away. As we are moving close to the end of the year, what should be the attitude of the business person that wants to take advantage of the end-of-the year buying spree either to launch a new product or service or to grow an existing one into market leadership?
You should behave like farmers do when the rainy season is very close. The farmer would have prepared his land and cultivated as much land as he could so that the rains would meet him with so much crops waiting for watering. Why? It is what is already planted that the rain will fall on and that will result into the harvest of tomorrow.
The same way, it is the product or service that is already developed and made market-ready that one can sell during the end of the year buying rush. You also want to make sure that when people are considering what to buy, your product or service is positioned right before their faces so that you can benefit from the surge in demand of the season.
It calls for promotional strategies that will not only attract buyers to what you have on offer, but will also spur them to buy as much of it as possible. The promotional strategy must be able to motivate very high volume patronage. What can one consider as high patronage? You should be aiming for minimum fifty to a hundred percent increase over what you were selling over a similar period at other times of the year. This means that the market should react so much in favour of your product or service over and above others and when they come to you, they should be moved to buy more than what they were buying before in terms of volume.
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It is not saying that they will be buying to stock them to use at another time. That is not real increase in demand. No. What is being said here is that the promotion will be able to bring out a desire for more consumption of the product. For example, why would a person who is visiting a restaurant to eat buy far more than what his stomach can hold just because the restaurant has a promotion offering an incentive to buy more? In this particular instance, the customer will want to get others to come along with him to eat at the restaurant or buy for others who would have gone to other restaurants to eat. In other words, the promotional strategy should make your product or service more competitive.
How can you make your product or service more competitive at this time? The answer is simple. Offer the customer superior value at this time, I mean superior product value. The customer must be getting far more value in terms of quality from what you have on offer. If you are following me, the promotion that will really work is the one that is premised on enhanced value of the product. Thereafter, what you will only need to do is to then announce the value enhancement that you have done and call people to come for the greatly enhanced product. I am not talking of cosmetic enhancement in terms of size, volume or freebies. Discerning customers will see through that. It should be based on enhancement of tangible quality that leaves the product not as it used to be. If what you have done results into that product or service going back to what it used to be in terms of real value of quality or something tangible that it is delivering to the customer, then you should consider the promotion as having failed because customers will not come back to your product again as they would have seen that you just took advantage of them to arouse their emotions to buy from you at that time.
In conclusion, every promotional strategy at this time should be based on the platform of getting out something of superior value so that the customer is motivated to continue the buying spree far beyond the season.
• Kola Owolabi, (FIMC) Fellow of the Institute of Management Consultants,08023203198,is the Executive Director of Centre of Entrepreneurial Research and Development based in Igbesa, a surburb of greater Lagos, in the vicinity of Crawford University. The organization has had the opportunity to execute landmark business development (business plan preparation and conduct of feasibility studies) and rmarket research briefs for organizations both within and outside Nigeria.He can be reached by phone or WhatsApp through 08023203198.
