Preteens Product Selling

Instructions:

Suppose you are the promotional manager for a new line of cosmetics targeted to preteen girls. You have been assigned the task of deciding which promotional mix element (advertising, public relation, sales promotion, personal selling, and online/interactive) should be used in promoting it. Your budget for promoting the preteen cosmetics line is limited. Given the nature of the product, the stage in the product life cycle, target market characteristics, type of buying decision, available funds, and pull or push strategy, identify the promotional mix elements and examples of specific tools you would select. Give a justification for your selection based on the pros/cons of the tool and the product/market characteristics (i.e., nature of product, stage in product life cycle, etc.) mentioned above.

Being a sales manager, I have the responsibilities to have an effective plan to promote the product considering the limited resources available to promote the product. Advertising is a way to propagate the message of the product. Budgeting is much important in our case, as we have to give weightage to our low funds to finance our campaign. Preteen’s products are specialized and are focusing the female gender. At this age we have to understand the choices and preferences that females have at this stage of their life. They want to look more glamorous and elegant at this stage of their life. Our product should be focusing on features to give added freshness and glow to their face.

Public relation is a way to promote the product. Keeping the customers intact, obtaining their feedback and then improving the quality of the product is a way to attain more customer attention in the market. Especially in young female class, public relationship might not be as effective as in mature class of customers, because of vulnerable thinking and lack of thought process maturity. They want things according to their way and always have the tendency to lead rather than follow the things. At this age their requirement along with elegance is health as well. So, the power that preteens exert, products are modelled according to their needs and requirements.

Sales promotions at the colleges and high schools, teen awareness programs, can gain attention for the product. Conveying the message that our products are health friendly and will add more glow and elegance to their personality. At such places personal selling can also take place. Special offers on campus visits, sponsoring a sports gala or a cultural event at the college and school will gain considerable attention for our product.

Online selling is other way of reaching to customer, as today is the age of internet, most of the teens have direct access to internet, so use of digital media in advertisement of our product is a good idea, and it have the reach out to international territories. Today teens are much familiar with the use of social media. A social media campaign can be a good idea. Our brand can hire a

young actress as our brand ambassador, presence of a showbiz personality will add to strength of our product and it will be much beneficial in appealing to teens to have the use of our product. Glamour is their supreme preference.

I will opt the digital media as a medium to reach out first to our customers, as it is economic and have greater reach out, using social media we can make the use of budgets efficiently and can take the message of our product to greater number of teen customers and our product can be known globally because of global reach out of social media. As it is age of internet, so use of social media is cheaper considering our budget constraints. The second option is to go with personal selling, visiting campuses of the schools and colleges to propagate the message of our product.

Strengths of using Digital media to propagate our message, are it is having direct interaction with customers, it is also serving in kind of personal selling. It is having global reach out. It is not specified to one territory. Considering the US market conditions, use of digital media is much effective than any other media, because of the greater usage of digital media.

Odds come with the use of digital media as well, there might be lower number of teens familiar with the use of social media. They might not be getting what is communicated to them with the use of digital media. Use of digital media might impair the focus of the campaign and message may become too vague that target customer class might be unable to understand what is communicated to them.