Wrap Up

There are eight key advantages of direct marketing: precision targeting, personalization, flexibility, privacy, measurability, low cost, detailed knowledge of consumers, and fast or immediate response. Direct response advertising is one segment of the direct-marketing industry, and it plays a major role in influencing consumer purchase patterns. It can be defined as advertising through any medium, designed to generate a response by any means that is measurable (for example, mail, television, telephone, fax, or Internet).

Personal selling is a personalized form of communication that involves a seller presenting the features and benefits of a product or a service to a buyer for the purpose of making a sale. For film commissions, personal selling plays a number of important roles: gathering marketing intelligence, locating and maintaining customers, promoting to the trade, generating sales at point of purchase, relationship marketing, and providing detailed and up-to-date information to the trade. Objectives of personal selling include achieving sales volume, up-selling and second-chance selling, market share or market penetration, and product-specific objectives. The sales process consists of seven steps: prospecting and qualifying, pre-planning, presentation and demonstration, negotiation, handling objections and questions, closing the sale, and following up after closing. A sales manager has three key roles to play. The first is to recruit salespeople, the second is to train them, and the third is to motivate and reward them.

Word of mouth is communication about products and services between people who are perceived to be independent of the company that is providing the product, in a medium perceived to be independent of the company.