The Dangers of Buying Promotion by the Pound

It is striking to step back and look at the changes that have swept through the ranks of corporate marketing departments over the last two years.

Companies such as McDonald’s, Nabisco, Procter & Gamble, Pepsi, Warner-Lambert, and others have embarked upon major restructuring drives designed to better position their companies for the growth they anticipate over the next few years. In many cases, these events involve downsizing and outsourcing promotion functions to smaller teams and outside agencies in an effort to streamline operations and increase productivity.

In fact, many of these moves have been accompanied by announcements of increased investments in consumer promotion activity. This was the case with Nabisco, which announced a 30-percent increase in marketing expenditures on its cookies and crackers, even as it let go 3,100 employees. Likewise Kraft, which recently pared its $50 million corporate marketing program in order to reallocate funds away from advertising and into promotion (promo, March ’99).

Moves like these speak volumes about the increasing importance of promotion marketing as a strategic initiative. But there is a danger that lurks behind these actions.

The wave of restructuring has brought with it employee turnover. In many cases, long-time promotion specialists have seized the opportunity to break away and do something new. In others, the promo departments are virtually gone and the responsibility has been pushed outside the organization. In still others, the promotion function is migrating over to the sales organization.

The danger is that those responsible for minding the brand may not be as versed in the nuts and bolts of promotion as they should be. Promotion is not for amateurs, and as only the true professionals know, there’s nothing that looks so deceptively simple as a well-conceived, flawlessly executed promotion. But the devil is in the details, as the saying goes, and in promotion there are millions of details waiting to trip up the uninitiated or the unaware.

We are seeing and hearing about more and more cases in which companies copy the rules from one promotion and apply them to another, or contract with vendors based on price alone, or don’t even audit the performance of their promotions in the field. This may be because junior people are in control at some companies. At others, it’s because the institutional memory left the building with the last downsizing. The point is, if you’re the person responsible for planning promotions and sourcing vendors, it’s in your and your company’s interest to ask the right questions and work with the right vendors.

And if you’re buying promotion by the pound, sooner or later you’re likely to face a disaster of your own making.