One of the areas of critical concern to MPR professionals is what to consider appropriate criteria for measuring promotional outcomes

Question

What are the traditional measures of promotional efforts and in what way is measurement for MPR different in its approach to measurement?

Answer 1

Traditional promotional objectives depend heavily on advertising and other sales promotion methods to sell goods and services. The conventional argument about spending money on advertising, for instance, is that there are tangible returns on investment in the form of increased sales and market share. Sales objectives therefore seem reasonable outcomes of advertising campaigns. However, there may be other environmental variables both inside and outside of the marketing communications mix that may affect sales, regardless of the existence of an advertising campaign. The return on investment from conventional promotional efforts is also not necessarily immediate. Further, a promotional campaign waged solely on the basis of sales objectives often does not provide clear lessons for planning future campaigns.

On the other hand, MPR objectives tend to be mostly communication-based. The assessment of the return on investment of MPR efforts has more to do with the role of promotion as the achievement of certain communication outcomes, for instance, influencing various target audiences. The utility of this approach is that communication objectives are framed in terms of desired audience behaviors - whether action-oriented, attitude-oriented or information-oriented. MPR practitioners would argue that the role of marketing is to communicate, and finding out whether one is communicating with the right audience is an easier effect to gauge than precisely figuring out a promotional campaign's influence upon sales figures.