Promotional Strategies

"How do I get my product/service out there?" This is a question that many people who plan to begin their own businesses, or even larger companies who have already established a name for themselves, frequently ask. Your product or service may be the latest and greatest on the market today, but that doesn't help you if no one knows it exists. You need to find someway to make yourself and your product known.

That is where promotion comes into play. But what exactly is promotion? Well, www.dictionary.com defines promotion as:

The act of promoting or the fact of being promoted; advancement.

Encouragement of the progress, growth, or acceptance of something; furtherance.

Advertising; publicity.

Essentially this covers everything from commercials to magazine ads and even free items given out at exhibitions and trade shows. Promotion is preformed many different ways by many different people but when it all comes down to it there is really only one purpose. To get your name out there.

Now you're probably wondering which kind or promotional strategy would be best for your product, and you would be right to wonder about this. Not every product can be marketed in the same way. Truth be told the promotional strategy is based solely on the product or service. There is no list of defined laws for promotion. The best I can do is give some examples of promotion and explain some points. The rest is really up to you.

For simplicity sake all of my promotional examples are taken from the gaming software aspect of the Information Technology field. More specifically the games programmed for gaming consoles such as the Playstation and GameCube.

To start things off we'll discuss the media aspect of promotion. But just what makes a promotion successful? And how many types of promotions are out there? The Handbook Of Market Segmentation says:

Successful advertising calls for investing your dollars wisely. Advertising expenditures should be allocated to those media vehicles which can best deliver to target markets. Scores of different media can be used. One advertising company claimed that more than 14,000 choices exist. Obviously, most of these media are obscure, impractical, or unimportant. For simplicity, media can be divided into three major classes:

1.Broadcast- radio, television, film, and other electronic media

2.Print- newspapers and many types of trade periodicals

3.Other media- Internet, catalogs, direct mail, directories, outdoor and transit billboards. Specialty advertising, etc.

So knowing this lets take a look at some media promotions.

My first example comes from 1986. The Atari had its day in the sun and had been retired to that big cardboard box in the closet to make room for the new generation of video gaming system, the Nintendo Entertainment System (N.E.S. Or Super Famicom, as it was called in Japan, which my first example will show). Until now game consoles only offered little men made of black and white squares running across a background also made of black and white squares. The N.E.S. offered so much more. It gave you little men made of blocks running across backgrounds also made of blocks, but this time with 8-bit color!

Of course a system is only as good as its games. That is where my example one comes in. This is a Japaneses promotional commercial for The Legend of Zelda game1. This game is Nintendo's love child. It allowed them to climb into the game market and remain there for more than 20 years.

See, to attract people's attention you need to exploit popular trends. Back in the 1980' dance music was becoming very popular, what with the introduction of artists line Inxs and Cyndi Lauper. So Nintendo made a bold move, hired a bunch of dancers, and turned the commercial into a music video.

Aside from that another thing that was very popular in the 80's was Role Playing Games (RPG's). Unfortunately the prominent RPG of the 80's was Dungeons & Dragons. Problem was it wasn't very graphical as it was all on paper, and playing alone wasn't very fun. The Legend of Zelda was the solution to that problem. A single player RPG set in a medieval fantasy world. But how do you incorporate that in a music video? Simple, you dress all of the dancers in period garb. So in the end you are left with a hero, some monster, and a princess dancing to upbeat modern music. The result is a very effective and very memorable commercial.

However as I previously stated commercials are not the only form of promotion. Every year in Japan Nintendo throws a huge exhibition of new release games and future releases. The year that The Legend of Zelda was released was one of the largest exhibitions ever. Of course there was no shortage of free promotional items at this exhibitions. One of which was a free mouse pad2 featuring the hero from The Legend of Zelda game paired with another character from a different game who was already very popular, Mario3.

There is a very simple method behind this promotion. Pair the lesser known character with a character that is already popular among the gaming community. The plan was to have Mario's "coolness" rub off on the new hero. Needless to say it worked, possible more so. The hero from The Legend of Zelda is by far now more popular than Mario.

But enough of the past. Lets move on to something more recent. The year is 2004 and gaming technology has advanced by leaps and bounds. The N.E.S. gave way to the Super Nintendo, which gave way to the Nintendo