Promotions typically aim to drive volume while ensuring a positive impact on the brand.

This growth can be achieved by getting current customers to buy more, buy more frequently, or entice lapsed users or new users to purchase.

Either way, the goal is to inspire a change in behaviour. By adding value to the product or brand a promotion serves to be the carrot to get our shoppers doing something different to what they currently do.

It’s fairly obvious then to conceive that the greatest behaviour change will occur when we deliver the greatest value to the shopper.

Shoppers look at value in a number of different ways.

Putting brand and product benefits aside for a moment, when it comes to promotions shoppers will see value if they are given something they want, without having to work too hard to get it.

It is also safe to say that the holy grail of promotions will drive both current customers and incremental users to the brand.

Devon Rick, managing partner of IMI, says “don’t underestimate the importance of lapsed or infrequent users. Looking across our database of over 13,000 promotional programs, just under 80 per cent of the lift in volume is driven by non-loyal customers”.

While promotions can most certainly play a role in rewarding loyal shoppers, by their very definition, they are already purchasing your brand.

They may participate in the promotion but it’s likely you would have got most of those sales anyway so the trick is to use a mechanic to ensure they are buying more or more often.

The largest opportunity often lays with shoppers that are either promiscuous across brands, don’t often shop your category, or perhaps don’t even have an awareness of your product.

These conversions are pure incremental growth.

So how do we maximise promotional success?

IMI have measured and analysed thousands of promotions and recommend that optimisation at the concept stage can really accelerate ROI.

Consistently their findings point to several key tips:

● Get the prize right

● Ensure it’s relevant to the target audience but broad enough to appeal to most

● Make it simple to understand. Complexity of prizing layers can dilute comprehension.

● Make sure shoppers feel they have a chance to win – in 70 per cent of cases the smaller frequency prizing is more important than the grand prize

● Get the communication right

○ Know who you’re talking to. Understanding your audience is critical

○ Know what you need to talk about. Getting your messaging hierarchy right will optimise your media messaging and spend

● Get the promotional mechanics right

○ Make your promotion easy to enter. Shoppers won’t jump through hoops so think about the barriers you are putting in place. For example, the bottom 10 per cent of IMI’s assessment database is full of “in 25 words or less” promotions

○ Consider current shopping behaviour. If even your loyalists are only buying one unit per week, don’t ask them to purchase five to enter a promotion. It will be far too great a barrier for most (especially light/lapsed users) and will likely just result in pantry stocking giving you a drop in sales after the promotion.

Of course, none of these tips mean that every promotion must be formulaic. They are simply basic guidelines.

Of IMI’s 13,000+ programs, the true standouts are those that ooze creativity and exceptional integrated execution.

Best practice therefore is a combination of getting the fundamentals right and then challenging your agency to bring the ideas to life in a way that will achieve excitement and cut through.

Lastly, don’t discount the strength of re-running a promotional program.

While we marketers often get bored far too quickly and wish to move to a new ‘big idea’, if a promotion has been loved and was hugely successful, run it again.

Consider Mars 1-in-6, Kit Kash, Magnum Gold Class, and McDonald’s Monopoly.

These campaigns have all taken advantage of residual awareness and comprehension of the campaign to build momentum year on year.

The proof is in the pudding as they say.

Karen Spear is director of shopper marketing at The Zoo Republic. She can be contacted at karen.spear@zoorepublic.com.au.