Tools of the Trade: When Promotion Beats Advertising By Desiree Grace Sometimes you need a hammer, sometimes you need a mallet. Sometimes you need a crowbar, and other times a pry bar is the right tool for the job. This holds for the marketing trade. You need the right tools for the job. In the case of good marketing, sometimes Sales Promotion is the best tool. Sales Promotion is an incentive used to motivate action. Your target could be end-users, the channel, aka distribution, or it could be business buyers, like the MRO buyer or government procurement gal. Whichever target market you choose, Sales Promotion is gaining in popularity because it is easily measured and is a great way to stand out from the competition. It can also increase the perceived value of your products and services, as well as add value to your channel. I like Sales Promotion because you can put together a strategy and execute it quickly, as compared to traditional Advertising. Also, you can undermine a ...

Over the past year, I have been called to assist distributors and their supply partners in developing new and innovative marketing plans. I laid out a few of these plans last year in an article for Industrial Supply Magazine called It’s time to rethink Joint Marketing Plans. It seems at least a few others are thinking about distributor marketing as well. Rivet/MRO, a blog site sponsored by an organization providing software to track co-op funds, piggybacked my article and said this, “The fact is, most independent distributors have limited marketing expertise…” They go on to provide additional information on how and why distributors spend money on logoed promotional items and how-to better use co-op funds in general. You can read it here .  Just as implied by my Industrial Supply article, it is time for distributor marketing to move forward - first, move into a position of strategic thinking and second, improve to become a tool whose effectiveness can be meas...

Lately, Manufacturer and Distributor Joint Marketing Plans have been on my mind. This time of year I generally take a lot of calls from distributors and their supply partners on the topic. Allow me to share a few random thoughts. There are two varieties of plans which seem to go by the same name. Let’s look at both of types: Rebates designed to drive distributor behavior and reward performance. These plans typically create an incentive which comes as a rebate based on the distributor following some guideline. For example, if the distributor carries all of the manufacturer’s products, they get a bigger rebate than the wholesaler who simply cherry-picks the best of the supplier’s product line. Other versions of this type of plan incent distributors for having a specialist, properly trained staff, the right level of demo equipment or the proper inventory. I like these plans as they drive the behaviors and incent the distributor for being more than just a logistics arm for the ...