Covering promotions, stunts and events

BOUNCE BACKS AND OTHER COUPON OPTIONS

Coupon deals are everywhere. A place where I get my oil changed gives me a coupon good for a dollar discount on the next oil change plus a discount on their carwash next door. This is a bounce back. Many marketers don’t like this type of promotion. They feel it’s discounting their regular customers who would probably pay full price anyway. If possible, offer the coupon discounts to those whose business you would not have otherwise.

Many people, even those who don’t like bounce backs, will often use them in a case where they’re working with a volunteer organization. They provide customers you wouldn’t get otherwise. Coupons are an incentive for them to come back. This works great after a grand opening. Coupon programs can be enhanced by instilling enthusiasm in the program among your employers. They can wear buttons touting the product. They can cheerfully suggest to customers they try a new piece of pie, on sale today. Tell them exactly how you want them to present the program to the customer.

YOUR NEXT VETERANS DAYS PROMOTION?

When the movie “Platoon” came out on video, a video chain offered a free rental of the movie for Vietnam vets. They even offered the free loan of a VCR if the vet didn’t have one. This got good the chain some good publicity.

THEORIES ON FUND-RAISERS

There are several theories to pulling off a fund raiser. Some fund-raisers are stiff and not fun. Others like to have fun and many think that’s important. You can do this on any kind of fund raiser where death isn’t involved. If you’re raising money to fight cancer, then you’ll probably concentrate on pulling the heart strings instead of laughs. Many fund-raisers depend heavily on guilt. There was a handful of protesters for the last Jerry Lewis Muscular Dystrophy Telethon. They claimed it was a “pity party.” There probably is some truth to this but, this is about the only way to really raise money for this type of diseases. You have to pull the heart strings.

WHAT ABOUT A LINGERIE SHOW?

These continue very popular with night clubs. A few have them during the lunch hour but most are in the evening during happy hour.

PROMOTING WITH THE GUY NEXT DOOR…MAYBE

Your next door business neighbor may or may not be the ideal candidate for a cross promotion. Here’s the drawback. Let’s say you have a lube job place. They stop to have their oil changed and they go to the fast food restaurant next door. There, they pick up a coupon that gives them a two dollar discount on the oil change. They are getting a discount on something they have already ordered, not a smart move on your part. The solution is possible doing a promotion with someone a mile or two down the road, or someone at the other end of a shopping center. You want people to come to your store specifically because they have a coupon they picked up at another merchant, not next door.

PROMOTING YOUR EVENT

Timing is everything when promoting events. This means planning far ahead. You should work on a strict timetable, scheduling certain events for certain days. Let’s say you have a big event coming up soon, involving a good angle you think that the major media, tv, radio and the papers would be interested in. Send them a news release about two weeks in advance. Two or three days before the event, call the assignment editor. Succinctly sum up an angle or two that media would be especially interested in. For TV, it might be one thing, another thing for radio and something different for the newspaper.
 
Promoters often try to generate coverage on the first day of a weekend events. When a show is featured Friday afternoon on the radio, Friday night on the evening news, sales are almost up the following day. When you send the news release, you’ll usually send a pitch letter with it. Start off this letter with a good story. Don’t send a letter like one I received the other day which said “if you’d like an interview with Doctor Smith or Doctor Jones, it can be arranged.” I had not yet read the release so I had no idea what they were talking about. It’s not uncommon to include five or six releases, letter, a bio, a glossy photo, a background sheet.

News people are continually getting news releases or packages that are professionally and cleverly put together. It’s hard to be more clever than what the pro’s turn out. But it is possible. Sometimes the item you are promoting is your strongest asset. If you were promoting taking a bus load of people to the race track to bet the ponies in a fund raiser, you could include a losing ticket from that track. These are easily scooped up off the floor. If your show features a chicken that plays tic-tac-toe, include a picture of a chicken or maybe even a chicken feather. This could include an invitation for news people to play the chicken.

COUPON ADDICTION

It’s very easy for customers and businesses to get addicted to coupons. Do one coupon deal, it work’s, and you do another. Soon, you are doing coupon programs almost constantly. This can be a big setback. It threatens price credibility. It tells the customer your listed prices really mean nothing. Not smart. If they don’t have their coupons with them, they may decide to go elsewhere this time.

DETERMINING YOUR COMPETITORS

Depending on your type of business, you may have only one competitor or hundreds nearby. Determine who your major competitor is. Maybe you are a service station. Where is the nearest station? Perhaps there’s a business near that station that you can do a cross promotion, to bring business to you.

FINDING PROMOTION PARTNERS

Before you can do a promotion, you need someone to do it with. But what’s the best way to find partners? Brainstorming. You know the process: write down any and everybody that occur to you with little or hopefully no editing. Put down anything. Go through and get the good stuff later. Search the yellow pages and look at various types of business. Pick a business with customers with the same demographic profile that you have. This means people of a certain age, sex and income.

Go driving through the neighborhood. Group your shots as you pitch these people. Your unsuccessful pitches can be done in about two minutes or less. You can hit a lot of potential clients in a couple of hours. Look at people advertising in the newspaper. Most may be small merchants but their constant advertising proves that they are aggressive marketers.

TICKETS TO EVENTS

This is a very popular promotion for concerts, trade and consumer shows, sporting events. In a major market, there is no shortage of tie in’s. Auto shows, boat shows, home and garden shows, gun shoes, fairs, events sizes medium to big. Texaco is underwriting the Wynona Judd tour. A couple of years ago, they did the same thing with the Beach Boys. The customer gets discount coupons at Texaco. Even better, Texaco got major press when, to raise money for the Florida and Louisiana hurricane victims, it sold concert tickets to Judd’s Six Flags Over Texas concert for only $5.00 with money going to the hurricane victims. This made nationwide headlines. A ticket or coupon cane let the customer in free or at a discount. Many tickets work well on events with low admissions, maybe two dollars. With a coupon, they still have to pay the two dollars but it’s good for a rebate at your store.

TIME YOUR CROSS PROMOS

You should confine your cross-promotions to short periods of time, preferable one week or two. Employees get tired of working the promotion and soon start losing enthusiasm. The coupons should be dated to expire in a month or two or sooner.

KEEP FUND RAISING LOCAL

As far as a small business, every fund raising cross promotion should be local. This really brings the event home much more so than in a national or international effort such as money for kids in far off country. Quite often, local people will need large amounts of money for some sort of operation. This can tug at heart strings, especially if it’s someone whose plight is well known. Children who need costly lung or liver transplants are good examples. It sounds better when you have a specific amount that you need. If you need a special piece of equipment, tell them what it is. If it is a lot of money, this can be even more moving. It can be moving to hear a child needs a $100,000 operation or will most surely die.

HOLE IN ONE

The golf tournament. Nothing seems as popular as a fundraiser. And when you add as big dollar amount to the promotion, you really build excitement, especially when the amount is a million dollars. The Minyard supermarket chain, in Dallas/Ft. Worth, is currently running a hole in one promotion that works this way. It’s called the “Two million dollar hole-in-one and putting contest”. If someone gets a hole in one, they get a million dollars and charity gets one million dollars. For the contestant closest to the pin in the final competition, the store is giving away a Chevy S-10 Blazer. Entertainment organizers buy insurance against anyone making a hole in one.

STREET SMART MARKETING

The book “Street Start Marketing” gives some ideas of  very inexpensive promotions. Here are a very example to show sometimes, it doesn’t take little or no money to pull something off. Below are some examples:
 
** A small video appliance store in Colorado was near a big one that was having it’s grand opening. On the day of the new store’s grand opening, The old store…only blocks away, flew streamers and decorations with a sign saying “Now Open.” Many of the people got confused and went to the old store.
 
** A pizza chain offered a special pizza deal, two for one, for those ripping their competitor’s ad out of the yellow pages.
 
** A marketer found himself chairing a civic group meeting he had volunteered for. He sent out flyers offering organization members attending a free chicken dinner. Attendance was great but the crowd became incensed when they found out the chicken dinner was really little packets of dried corn. Quickly, fried chicken was sent for.
 
** A Chicago area electrician , ribbed by his buddies that he only had one truck, painted unit # 3 on the right side, unit # 4 on the left side and unit 5 on the back of the van. Suddenly it seemed like he had a fleet of vans.
 
** A landlord, tired of kids breaking the windows on a building, hand painted a sign saying “If you break these windows, you will go to jail. Ask Jimmie Plunkett!” When asked who Jimmy Plunkett was, the landlord said “I don’t know, but you sure don’t see him around here anymore, do you?”

WHEN PROMOTIONS FLOP

It happens. It seemed like a great idea. You were sure it would work. But it didn’t. Nothing is more plentiful than theories by participants about why a promotion flops. This is normal. Everyone involved with a promotion that doesn’t live up to their wildest expectations sit around wondering why. People in bars do this every night. If the crowd isn’t there, they usually think they’re either broke or down the street at their competition.

Weather can play a major factor in an event’s success. If it’s a great day, people may be out doing something else. Or maybe there’s a popular performer that people just have to see that night.

Material in The Small Business Promoter Newsletter is obtained from various wire services, trade magazines, press releases and the general media. All efforts are made to insure correctness of facts. Suggestions of promotions and press clippings are welcome. Published monthly. $50.00 yearly. Individual issues $5.00 printed or 5 1/4 floppy in ASCII format. P.O. Box 24297, Fort Worth, TX 76124. This file may be distributed to other bulletin board systems in whole only (for non-commercial purposes only) without deletions or additions. Material may be quoted with attribution to the Small Business Promoter. Copyright 1992 Paul Bottoms. All rights reserved.

Contributed by JD at 3:54 pm under Marketing & PR.