Product Promotion
Encyclopedia
Product promotion is the act of advertising a good or service with the short/long term goal of increasing sales. Many companies use different techniques to promote their products through a vast array of communication mediums. In this day and age, there is not necessarily one communication medium that is better than another simply because the most affective medium is based on what type of product you are promoting. There is the physical form of product promotion and the digital form, both of which require clear and concise textual information about the product being advertised.

Since the turn of the 21st century, many companies have been trying to utilize online social media
Social media
The term Social Media refers to the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into an interactive dialogue. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0,...

 for product promotion. Some of the most popular forms of online social media are Facebook
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...

, Twitter
Twitter
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...

, and MySpace
MySpace
Myspace is a social networking service owned by Specific Media LLC and pop star Justin Timberlake. Myspace launched in August 2003 and is headquartered in Beverly Hills, California. In August 2011, Myspace had 33.1 million unique U.S. visitors....

. Within an online social media network, companies have the ability to advertise and promote their products to anyone, at anytime, anywhere in the world. Because of the vast popularity of social media, companies have had great success on marketing products to the younger generation who otherwise might not have seen an ad in a newspaper or on TV.

Physical Product Promotion

Outside of online product promotion, companies still try to use effective techniques of physical product promotion in stores or on the street. To attract consumer attention, companies try to use bright, attractive displays depicting excitement, relaxation, or happiness. The strategy behind promoting a product affectively is knowing who your target audience is and what appeals to them.

The colors you choose to incorporate in your in-store ads or product packages will need to be well planned in accordance to your audience. Using colors like yellow and orange provoke excitement in the consumer; colors like blue and green establish trust, cleanliness, and calmness; red is a unique color in that it can provoke a sense of warning and danger but also at the same time, draw attention away from any other color.

A few examples of color and product relation would be a cleaner product using green on their package or advertisement to ensure the customer that the product they are buying will successfully meet their needs. Another example would be a water bottle distributor using blue on their labels to promote freshness and ensure the consumer that the water they are drinking is of the purest nature.
Along with certain color choices, many companies strategically plan how and where their products will be arranged in the stores. For instance, many consumers who enter grocery stores are not specifically looking for chewing gum
Chewing gum
Chewing gum is a type of gum traditionally made of chicle, a natural latex product, or synthetic rubber known as polyisobutylene. For economical and quality reasons, many modern chewing gums use rubber instead of chicle...

. Many chewing gum manufacturers position their products at the checkout lines where customers are more likely just to grab the gum because the wrapper looks attractive and it’s convenient seeing that the checkout process has already begun.

Now of course most products can be found on different shelves throughout the store and heavily rely on their packaging to attract the consumer’s attention. For example, many personal health product companies use very elaborate eye-catching designs on their packages to draw the customer’s attention away from the other personal health products that may be on the same shelf or at the same eye level. As mentioned before, colors on the packaging play a very important role in this circumstance simply because you usually have so any choices to choose from when shopping for personal health items.

Over the past ten years the physical product promotion aspect of marketing has become less and less important to consumers seeing that many individuals spend most of their time watching TV or surfing the web. However, this is not to say that companies are investing any small amount of money into the research and development of effective physical product promotion, the construction of their product packages and advertisements are still of the utmost importance.
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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