Ch. 18 - Sales Promotion and Personal Selling

Through sales promotion efforts a business can very quickly boost its profits by offering customers short-term incentives to purchase goods right away rather than waiting until later on to buy. Specific tools many businesses employ in their sales promotion strategies include coupons, rebates, frequent buyer programs, premiums, and sampling, but to name a few. 

The cover price for a single issue of Vogue magazine at the newsstand is currently 4 dollars, while for 20 dollars a full year’s subscription to both the digital online version and hard copy of the magazine can be purchased, coming to about 1.60 an issue. For 15 dollars a hard copy subscription alone can be purchased. Yet with the rising popularity of tablet readers along with easy internet accessibility to the full magazine, a notable surge in dual media subscribers has kept Vogue’s overall profit and growth surprisingly high these past years. By expanding the loyalty marketing technique of yearly, and often multi year subscriptions while continuing to expand and promote online marketing, Vogue is continuing to succeed in the face of declining customer loyalty and increasing difficulty to sell hard copies all across the magazine industry.       

Vogue also makes use of strategic sampling in an effort to broaden its loyal customer base. Free six month and even full year subscriptions of vogue are often packaged together with expensive cosmetics sets, certain perfume sales, and other beauty products. This arrangement can greatly benefits both Vogue and the partner beauty product company as customers will very often pay to further extend their subscriptions which in turn heavily advertise the various beauty products that introduce the magazine to customers to begin with. 

In contrast to sales promotion methods, which work well along side advertising to sell a basic, standardized product to a large customer base, personal selling focuses on more complex, highly specialized products that appeal to a very small, particular segment of the market. Products such airplane engines or prosthetic limbs would call for personal selling. Vogue magazine though relies almost entirely on advertising and sales promotion to reach its clientele, and not on personal selling. The fact that Vogue magazine has a relatively low value per issue, is a standardized product (on a monthly release basis), and has customers dispersed across very wide geographic areas means that advertising and sales promotion work especially well for its business model.