MARKETING AND PROMOTION
Promotion is part of marketing which can be considered as one of the youngest disciplines in the business world and is driven by innovation (Sutheralnd and Canwell, 2004). Within it, marketing communications, or promotion, is a management process through which an organization engages with its various audiences. Through understanding and audience’s communications environment, organizations seek to develop and present messages for their identified stakeholder groups, before evaluating and acting upon the responses received. By conveying messages that are of significant value, audiences are encouraged to offer attitudinal and behavioral responses (Fill, 2005). Generally, promotion is used by organisations to communicate with customers with respect to their product offerings. In this sense, promotion is one side of the communication process with customers (Rowley, 1998).
These days’ people and customers are exposed to radio on FM, medium wave and long wave, three national commercial stations and some 180+ regional and local commercial radio stations. There are over 3500 magazines covering every imaginable interest. There is a wide range of outdoor media, not just fixed poster sites, but posters on the sides of buses and taxi cabs, on the underground and at railway stations, not to mention that many people have become walking advertisements for the brands they wear, with cloths bearing logos for all to see. In this array of confusion, marketing communications increasingly represents the single most important opportunity for companies to convince potential consumer of the superiority of their products and services (Yeshin, 1998). Another important factor for marketers is speed of information access, especially in today’s rushed world, in ...