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 In
the commercial world 'promotions mix' tends to include seven modes
of promotion: personal selling, sales promotion (which covers money-off
promotions, competitions, free accessories, coupons, buy-one-get-one-free),
public relations (the deliberate, planned and sustained effort to
establish and maintain mutual understanding between an organisation
and its publics), direct mail, trade exhibitions, advertising and
sponsorship.
Promotions can be plotted along an axis of confrontation vs collaboration;
this time set against involvement of the public.
- At one of end of the spectrum are protesting and activism strategies.
These include direct action.
- Public education and mobilisation tends to involve getting
large numbers of people to write, petition, march, join or otherwise
show their support for a cause.
- Litigation is a particular (in fact the original) form of rights-based
advocacy
- Persuasion, lobbying often involving high-level networking
are classic arts in policy influence and usually sit under the
public affairs departments of larger companies.
- Action-research and model programmes, often with a strong evaluation
function to learn lessons, is a key way to show that a proposed
new approach or policy change can work.
- Coalition, constituency and campaigning / influencing network
building is a core ways to increase impact.
- Public relations and communications (sometimes including advertising
and marketing) and publications.
- The media is key way of communicating, including high-brow
editorials or opinion pieces in broadsheets or trade press, or
papers in academic journals.
- Citizen engagement, consultation, participation and consensus
in decision-making and policy delivery.
It is important to consider these forms of promotions in relation
to the Policy Strategy Quadrant (Figure 1, in the introduction)
which emphasises the degree of confrontation / collaboration and
the degree of interest vs evidence base. Thus different organisation
may choose the same overall methods, but may use them in very different
ways, with different language. The promotions mix table above illustrates
what these differences might look like in practice.
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