The Role of Promotion Marketing

The Role of Promotion Marketing

Introduction

In this paper I will compare the promotion strategies of the brands that I chose for Module 1 (Nordstrom and Wal-Mart). Discussing how they use these companies to get to your card market. We will also on the way used by these companies to advertise their brand. Review and identify the components of the promotion mix used by these companies, and why they choose these specific components. Finally we will discuss our position regarding the use of social media market and how this could positively or negatively impact these companies.

The Promotion Strategy

Nordstrom has been an elite institution able to renew themselves and achieve superior long term performance. Customer service, almost to the point of being obsequious, is a Nordstrom lifestyle that has its roots in 1901, eighty years before the customer service programs became fashionable. Nordstrom people talk about heroic customer service and individual performance of each sales star. Many companies could have the core value of heroic customer service, but few create as intense a culture around this value as Nordstrom.

Nordstrom, a department chain, has had phenomenal success around the country, largely based on factors beyond the products it sells, from the use of smartly dressed musicians sitting at a piano playing, or employees that make feel the most important customer of the day. The company has consistently emphasized over more established competitors in every mall. By August 2010 Nordstrom, in its effort to improve the shopping experience of their customers decided to join forces with Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Suite (SS & FS). "Nordstrom appreciates the importance of investing in appropriate IT systems to support growing customer expectations," said Jim Bengier, chief executive of global retail industry, Sterling Commerce. "Sterling Commerce is proud to work with Nordstrom to help the retailer improve your shopping experience and sales effectiveness." (Europa Press, 2010). Some of the solutions implemented by Nordstrom with SS & FS include the area of direct sales with Sterling Catalog and Offer Management and Sterling Order Management to improve their order capture and fulfillment capabilities. SS & FS has benefited Nordstrom in the area of sales promotion and publicity. Nordstrom has benefited its customers by offering a unique shopping experience in all forms of marketing including: web, call center, store and outside sales.

Now, the major strengths of Wal-Mart are experience and confidence, their main focus is on having a good customer service, and its marketing strategy aim towards ensuring customers will always find what they want at low prices. The company has a rule in which any employee who is within 10 feet of a customer to say hello and ask that can help (direct sales). Based on internal and external analysis, Wal-Mart set the strategies to develop their stores in different markets in search of success against its competition. To this, managerial strategies that have been tested by the industry are added, which in itself are the guidelines that are used by competitors as "Benchmarking".

As the largest chain of