Live from PMA Law Conference: Promotion is a Modern Business

Promotion is a contemporary industry and is more important than ever, playing a key role in integrated marketing along with traditional advertising and public relations.

More than $429 billion is spent on promotion, including consumer and trade and account-specific promos, Claire Rosenzweig, the president of the Promotion Marketing Association, said yesterday.

But hitting that ever-elusive consumer target is not so easy.

“Consumers are moving all the time,” Rosenzweig said. “We have to be more innovative and creative to reach them. I’ve observed that as marketers we have had to start looking at the world through a new lens. We know that the consumer is in control.”

That new lens reveals a changing perspective from not just how marketers engage consumers, but how to give consumers a way engage marketers. This type of one-to-one engagement comes with an endless number of touch points, including new mediums that have both legal and business ramifications coming under much closer scrutiny, she said.

New promotion models should be seen as an opportunity, as opposed to a threat, Rosenzweig said.

She cited Unilever’s Dove “Real Beauty” campaign and its smooth integration into pop culture as one example.

Recently, the brand placed a 75-second viral film on YouTube that showed a “plain Jane” transformed into a ready-for-print model using makeup and editing touchups. The film has been viewed more than 1.7 million times, written about in numerous publications and chatted about on talk shows.

“Dove got better ROI from the YouTube spot than from the Super Bowl spot [it ran earlier this year],” Rosenzweig said. “This kind of innovation takes risks. You have to experiment fearlessly. But that can be tough. Marketers are afraid of failure and organizational cultures don’t always nurture change.”

Building brand advocates from the inside out by attracting top talent is key to successes like the Dove campaign, she said. She said to remember the “four M’s”:

• Know what motivates people to be involved with a brand
• Create a relevant message
• Use media that resonates with the target
• Maximize the knowledge gleaned from the process to build “knowledge storehouses”

“There are those who still claim advertising is king and that promotion is all about discounting,” Rosenzweig said. “And there are also very progressive people who are also being challenged everyday. To all of these people I would say, ‘Take a look through the new lens. It’s a different world.'”

The PMA Law Conference which is being held in Chicago ends today.