The Art of Gaining and Retaining Customers - Is Sales Promotion the Key to Succesful Marketing?

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2005 in the subject Business economics - Offline Marketing and Online Marketing, grade: 1,7 (85%), Mid Sweden University, language: English, abstract: Due to the keen competition nowadays, companies are increasingly attaching more importance to sales promotion to attract consumers and to relationship marketing to retain them as loyal clients. It is crucial for enterprises to know people's reactions towards marketing tools in order to implement them successfully. Therefore, this study analyses the impact of these two concepts, with an emphasis on sales promotion, on the customers' purchase decision-making process by investigating consumers' points of view towards these instruments. These attitudes will be explained by the notion of deal-proneness. An online survey has been conducted in Germany with 471 respondents. The aim was not just to examine financial advantages but also material incentives which make people buy a certain product, as economic savings are not the only benefit of purchasing a product. Hence, we concentrated on five sales promotion tools, namely samples, coupons, premiums, loyalty cards and sweepstakes. The results, among others, show that samples and coupons are the customer's favourite actions whereas sweepstakes do not achieve the desired effects for the company. Furthermore, this research states possibilities to connect short-term promotion tools with the long-ranging relationship approach.