Communicating your brand to your target audience to increase sales

Sometimes we have a great idea for cutting through the advertising clutter and getting correct to our target audience, only to find that they lack the necessary indicates to receive our message. For instance, running a TV advertising campaign in a nation where only a couple of individuals own personal televisions is likely to end in failure - as would running a newspaper campaign in a nation with low literacy levels.

Finding the perfect way to reach a target audience is not usually simple: most advertising expenditure is wasted because it takes a scattergun approach, sending the messages out almost at random, with many people who would by no means purchase the product being contacted (and frequently irritated) by promotional efforts.

Occasionally it's possible to give people the means to obtain the messages - or even permit them to earn the means, if the medium itself is desirable.

PepsiCo's brand Mountain Dew is a popular soft drink in America and some other markets. PepsiCo wanted to target a youth market with the product, but young people are notorious under-consumers of media like magazines and newspapers, and are also known to be marketing-savvy (particularly in America, exactly where more than half of the population have attended a marketing course of some kind).

A few years ago, PepsiCo spotted an opportunity. It became fashionable for teenagers to carry pagers (electronic messaging devices), so PepsiCo hit on the concept of running a sales promotion in which teenagers could buy a pager for a heavily discounted cost if they sent ten Mountain Dew bottle tops in towards the company.

The promotion was a great good results in increasing sales of Mountain Dew, but more importantly it put PepsiCo in the position of having millions of members of their target audience walking about carrying a dedicated communication device. PepsiCo were in a position to send out promotional messages towards the whole group at the touch of a button - giving them instant access towards the exact individuals they needed to get in touch with, at minimal cost.

The price of the pagers was not much more than the $20 the customers paid for them: this is a self-liquidating sales promotion, because the promotion pays for itself - an excellent concept in itself!

Self-liquidating promotions require you to find something that people wish to purchase, and that carries a high profit margin - otherwise it is not feasible to offer a big sufficient discount to be attractive, but nonetheless cover the costs.

Communication devices are not necessarily electronic - free magazines or newspapers would work just as well. Attempt to make sure that the communication device is valuable in itself to your target audience. Do not overuse the medium - you don't want individuals to throw the device away or leave it switched off most of the time.

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Communicating your brand to your target audience to increase sales

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