The Use of Sales Promotion Competitions in Social Marketing

Abstract

It has been suggested that many social marketing campaigns fail because they assign advertising the primary role and fail to develop and use all of the available marketing mix tools.

In addition, social advertising has to compete for the public's attention with increasingly costly and sophisticated commercial marketing campaigns. This has led to a growing interest in sates promotion techniques for social marketing.

Despite the increasing use of sales promotion techniques in the commercial sector, they have never received the academic scrutiny given to advertising. These techniques have traditionally been “bundled” together, with the research conducted being dominated by value-increasing promotions (those which alter the product/price “deal”) involving money-off, coupons or “x % extra for free.” These promotional techniques are the least appropriate for social marketing campaigns, which rarely involve either a tangible product or an economic price. Value adding campaigns (those which introduce benefits not directly connected to the core product or its price) such as promotional competitions (also known as contests and sweepstakes) or give-aways, are the most suitable for social campaigns but the least well understood in terms of research.

This paper discusses alternative “below-the-line” promotional tools and demonstrates how promotional competitions - in particular - can help with the distinctive communication challenges faring social marketers. Experience and research from the commercial sector is used to suggest guidelines for planning competitions.