[MUSIC] Jab, jab, cross, hook, uppercut. No, this is not a video about boxing but actually about B2B promotion. And we will see why. [MUSIC] Okay, I admit it. I'm a poor boxer, but I think I illustrated how combination in boxing is important. And combination will be a keyword in this segment on B2B promotion. This is the agenda. I’ll talk about promotion at a very fundamental level. I’ll talk about, as in boxing, the kind of weapons that we have. I’ll talk about AIDA, and I'm not talking about the opera, and ABC and Boxing. I'll talk about advertising considerations. So I'll talk about personal selling considerations. And lastly, wrap it up by giving you a very simple, but I hope useful worksheet for you to plan your promotion strategy. So, let's get started. Okay, this is just a quick promotion recap. Promotion is essentially communication. And whether it's in the B2C realm or is in the B2B realm, ultimately we have to communicate. And this is a very famous model that describes communication as being the 5 W's. So, these are the deliverables that you want to achieve when you do any kind of promotion, again, in B2B marketing. You have to identify who the brand is. You have to deliver a message, that's the why. You have to have a specific target, and that is to whom. You have to use your medium, or media if it's more than one medium, wisely. Which is what which refers to. And lastly, at the end of the day, it has to work and that's what the final W, what effect, means. A lot to do. But fortunately, we have a lot of weapons. So, as in boxing where you have the jab, you have the cross and then you have the hook, then you have the uppercut. Here we have a lot of punches that we can use. And we even have new ones, one that we didn't see in B2C, such as trade shows. Trade shows, I love trade shows. So, I will give you a question on the discussion boards as to how trade shows can help you deal with the gatekeeper problem, which is very prevalent in many B2B marketing situations. Okay, so, AIDA and ABC. I haven't talked that much about movies, but one movie that I really like, which is about B2B, is a movie called Glengarry Glen Ross. And it's also a very famous play written by David Mamet and there's a great scene in the movie and in the play where they talk about AIDA. An AIDA is a hierarchy which stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. So these are the hurdles that we have to clear through ultimately to win, which is the action part. And action can also be described as always be closing. Always be closing. So in the movie, Alec Baldwin emphasized always be closing. So, that's my impersonation of Alec Baldwin. So, before you close, again, you have to gain attention, gain interest, gain desire and then you can close. So, all the prior steps have to be taken before you can close. And how you do it. Well, we can align them with the proper promotional mix weapon. So in terms of gaining attention, especially in a very inexpensive way, in a very credible way, it can be PR. But you can't just only rely on PR, and that's why to really stimulate more interest, that's when you maybe have to spend some money on advertising. But then, again, to stir people to action or close to action, to instill some desire on the part of people to maybe want to buy it, that's where sales promotion can come into play. And lastly, how you close it may require something, excuse me, very personal, personal selling. So, let me re-organize this in this following way. Where as we see, it starts with A, Attention, which leads to I, which is Interest, which leads to D, which is Desire, and finally ends with Action. And at first we may think that our PR or advertising in terms of creating attention is very inefficient because when we compare the reach of our weapon in terms of the actual conversion rate, it's low. But what I want to emphasize here is not just the per stage efficiency which matters, but rather the cumulative efficiency that we attain. Because at the last stage which is closing, the action part, we see that the conversion rate is actually very high. And that has been enabled by all the work being done by A, I and D. So again, it's like boxing. The jab, the jabs, and the crosses, and the hooks that have weakened our opponent, and allow us, and the keyword here is they set up the closing uppercut KO punch. But we can't start off with the KO punch. In fact, there something called a counter punch. If we start with something very expensive, we may leave ourselves open to being counter attacked. This can happen in marketing as well. So again, before we're ready to use that expensive but powerful weapon, which in this case will be personal selling, which is actually very expensive, we need to set it up. It's true in boxing, it's true in promotion. Okay, so there is a proper sequence, as in boxing.
