Selling Strategies

This course equipped students with the tools necessary to craft an effective integrated strategy for the promotion of goods and services. Students learned about the variety of consumer and trade-oriented sales promotions available to marketers, and how to design such promotions for maximum sales as well as branding impact. The course also considered how business success can be facilitated by a strong sales effort. To this end, the course covered the role of selling in the broader marketing plan, as well as principles of successful selling, and touched on salesforce management. Other integrated marketing communications tools that we covered including public relations and crisis management, direct marketing, sponsorships, and influencer marketing. Although the principles of effective advertising are covered comprehensively in MGT 6460, this course covered optimal strategies for the integration of sales promotion and advertising, with particular focus on the life cycle of the brand.
An important starting point for the course was providing a foundation of consumer behavior. It should be obvious that the goal of influencing consumers’ purchase behavior requires consideration of how consumers think, and how they make decisions. Accordingly, we talked about the processes underlying consumer choice behavior, and how the different elements of the promotion toolbox can be used to influence choice.
A primary focus of this course was on intelligently integrating and applying concepts introduced in this class, as well as concepts from other courses, to real world promotion decisions. It is difficult in promotional planning to be completely sure that a chosen strategy is superior to the alternatives. Rather, promotion decisions often represent the best guess possible given available general knowledge of marketing principles, and the specifics of the decision situation in which a manager finds him or herself. Accordingly, the course made heavy use of case studies, and will include student projects and presentations. Learning the foundations of the principles of effective promotions and then practicing applying them in various contexts was the primary use of the course time.