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Unit 11 Personal Selling, Public Relations And Sales Promotion and Digital UNIT 11 PERSONAL SELLING, PUBLIC Marketing RELATIONS AND EXPERIENTIAL MARKETING Structure 11.0 Objectives 11.1 Introduction 11.2 Personal Selling – Definition and Meaning 11.3 Approaches to Personal Selling 11.4 Contribution of Personal Selling to Event Marketing 11.5 Sales Creativity 11.6 Public Relations 11.7 The New Role of PR: Experiential Marketing for Brand Experiences 11.8 Direct Marketing 11.9 Conclusion 11.10 Let Us Sum Up 11.11 Keywords 11.12 References and Suggested Readings 11.13 Check Your Progress - Possible Answers 11.0 OBJECTIVES The previous three Units of this Block in which we discussed brand building, advertising, sales promotion and digital marketing helped us to understand that the market as well as consumer engagement have seen a significant shift in the recent years. In the present Unit, we shall be discussing other important traditional tools like personal selling and public relations, along with the emerging trends in experiential marketing, through events, that focus on creating experiences for consumers. Although these tools are characteristically different, they play a significant role in event marketing and promotion and eventually have a lot of synergy with the concept of event marketing. After reading this Unit, you will be able to: • Understand the role of personal selling as an effective marketing communication and promotional tool, and in maintaining long term relationships with customers; • Identify different selling skills through sales creativity; • Highlight the role of public relations in maintaining an organization’s reputation and public perceptions; • Understand and explain the very significant role of experiential marketing through events for establishing relationships with brands; and • Describe the role of direct marketing in event promotion. 95 Event Promotion 11.1 INTRODUCTION The art of personal selling is a traditional and effective marketing tactic which allows the seller to identify a customer’s need and respond to it. The component of interpersonal communication in personal selling, that consists of direct and personal interaction between buyer and seller (person-to-person), is often overlooked by event companies. But here are the facts. Person-to-person selling is what all other promotional activity leads up to. It is necessary for event marketers to understand this. Public relations (PR) have an impact on the overall consumption of an event and is an important marketing communications tool. The power of direct marketing holds equal significance. It is a cheaper and more focused alternative to the mass communication tactics of public relations and advertising. Experiential marketing is definitely on the agenda of all marketers in today’s times. It helps in establishing a personal connect with consumers and developing a sense of brand recall. This Unit discusses personal selling, public relations, experiential marketing and direct marketing for promoting events. We shall begin our first section with personal selling. 11.2 PERSONAL SELLING – DEFINITION AND MEANING Personal selling is an important form of persuasive communication that takes place between a sales staff and potential buyer. Being a two-way process, personal selling carries great potential of influencing the buyer’s behaviour. Personal selling is a direct communication or interpersonal communication between sales force / organisation’s representatives and individual consumers. The communication involves person-to-person contact through face-to-face interaction, by telephonic / mobile conversation or by e-mails or online chats for the pitching of a product or service to a prospective buyer. It helps to materialize a deal and converts a prospect into customer. Personal selling as a form of persuasive communication has the objective of generating sales, as well as building and maintaining the long-term relationships with the client. It involves selling across the counter or door-to-door selling. In selling across the counter, the customer approaches the shop / store and is attended by a sales person. The customer may visit the seller physically or contact them via phone, email and online chat. In door-to-door selling, it is the sales person who approaches the customers and generates leads. The sales person may approach the customer by physically visiting her / him or via email, phone and online chat. The key aspects which give an edge to personal selling over other promotional tools are - (i) the ability to generate useful feedbacks during personal interaction which could be utilized to make improvements in the product and the services as well, and; (ii) to customize the presentation according to the needs and understanding of the potential customer with whom the sales person is communicating. Presence of these features gives personal selling immense power to generate sales for the company and keep personal selling superior to advertising and sales promotion in converting demand for the product and services into actual purchases. The term personal selling has been defined by Stanton as follows - Personal selling consists of individual personal communication, in contrast to the mass 96 impersonal communication of advertising, sales promotion and other promotional Personal Selling, Public Relations and Experiential tools. This definition conveys to us that the performance of personal selling as a Marketing promotional tool depends on the individual’s (sales person’s) personal communication skills. This means that a company (event organizer) must be very prudent in selecting sale persons. Only professional sales people, who are skilled, will be able to use the features of personal selling to their advantage and bring out sales effectively. Kotler has described sales-led organizations as ‘fearing’ that customer will not buy unless there are concerted sale efforts made by the organizations. Without selling you will get no customers, and without customers there can be no business. 11.3 APPROACHES TO PERSONAL SELLING Personal selling as an element of marketing mix plays a significant role in building and maintaining long term relationships. Today, companies focus a lot on training and mentoring of the sales team as they have realized that the significance of personal selling goes beyond the achievement of a single sale transaction. With this concept, personal selling has created a distinguished space for itself in the customer relationship management. Sales persons build these relationships by listening to the customers, attending to their needs and coming up with customized solutions. Personal selling may take several forms to reach out to customers including calls and mails from company’s sales representatives; assistance by a sales clerk; personal interaction at stalls; showrooms and malls; an informal invitation from one company’s executive to another; and event venues seeking regular and repeat bookings from local businesses. There are no glossy brochures, no publicity stories, no competitions or gimmicks, but plain person-to-person selling, which leads to other promotional activity. Broadly, personal selling techniques are categorized into two basic approaches. These are sales-oriented approach and customer-oriented approach. Kotler et al. highlight the contrasting behavior and tactics used in these two approaches. Sales-oriented approach - This approach uses high pressure sales technique, exaggerates product’s merits and criticizes competitor’s product. The approach believes that customers buy only when they are under pressure and get influenced by a slick presentation. Customer-oriented approach - This approach analyses the customer’s need, the salesperson listens to them and questions them to get thorough understanding of their issues, to work towards providing appropriate solutions. For them customer’s needs present an opportunity for building loyal relationships. The two approaches clearly bring out the intent of what the company wants to achieve from personal selling. Customer-oriented approach aiming at building long term relationships, definitely increases the satisfaction among customers and contributes directly to the efforts of customer relationship management. 11.4 CONTRIBUTION OF PERSONAL SELLING TO EVENT MARKETING The definition of sales promotion given by Stanton (in section 11.2), conveys that personal selling is that promotional tool which consists of person-to-person 97 Event Promotion communication, in contrast to advertising and sales promotion. Many times an advertisement is able to influence the consumers and motivate them towards the product but consumers may have some doubts or require more information about the product before they finally make a purchase. In such situations, personal selling creates that platform where sales people can interact with consumers, provide them with the required information and clear their doubts. Personal selling helps to overcome the inertia that keeps the consumers away from buying and stimulates the consumption process by reducing people’s reluctance to make a purchase decision. To understand the contribution of personal selling in event marketing, one has to acknowledge the complexity of contemporary events. Today, events are not just a way to share and celebrate one’s happy moment but have evolved as a full blown professional sector having nation-wide economic impact. Events have to be understood not just in terms of staging but also in the way they are managed and operated backend, promoted, executed, monitored and evaluated.
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