Promotional Incentives are Rewarding Brands with Customer Loyalty

Ask a person to define "promotional incentive”, and the answer you get is probably rooted in the industry of the respondent. Depending upon context, it may be described as something from the ad specialty realm (like a key chain or t-shirts) to the more conceptual, such as sweepstakes, and everything in between. It is so broad, even the modern day Rosetta Stone, Wikipedia, fails to come up with anything meaningful.

For Promotional Currency, “promotional incentives” are their business. They define it as any of a number of tactical things that are designed to motivate consumers, distributors, salespeople and related constituencies. They:

• Grab attention/create excitement
  
• Contain some sort of relevance to the particular audience
• Create motivation to take a specific action

Here are three recent examples from Promotional Currency’s stable of promotional incentives:

1. Sara Lee used a coupon for free loaf of Bread to generate trial among consumers, and to give direct store sales specialists a tool to increase product orders and to create some off shelf display opportunities at retail.
2. Canadian Tire used an instant win game card include in a national FSI drop to get increase store traffic during a key selling season.
3. Kraft’s Athenos line of ethnic foods tied into the release of a major musical motion picture, offering consumers a chance to get free music from the soundtrack with a purchase.

In each case, the promotional incentive was a response-based marketing tactic that was used to create a very specific behavior within a targeted constituency at a key time for each sponsor.

For us, there is an important additional characteristic, and that was that in all three cases, Promotional Currency was able to fix the exposure prior to the start of each promotion, so the sponsors did not have to worry about budget overruns should more consumers than projected respond.

The key to an effect promotional incentive is to find some sort of incentive, or “currency” that resonates within a target audience, and has a high perceived value, as compared to what the target has to do to get the incentive.

As the economy continues to impact consumer behavior, value is in, and it is increasingly important to find and utilize promotional incentives that create incremental value, and give targets a reason to choose A over B (or vice versa). To be successful, marketers do not have to be low cost leaders to succeed, but they do have to provide perceived value above and beyond the competition.