Promotion is a creative marketing tool

A promotion can carry the brand idea

Beth used Cadbury as an example. The brand has spent years associating itself with generosity, including through its sports partnerships. The interesting part is what happens as that idea moves closer to the shop floor. Promotional activity does not suddenly abandon the wider brand story. It can carry the same idea into retail, giving customers something to participate in while still feeling unmistakably like Cadbury.

That sounds obvious when you put it like that. Yet plenty of promotional activity could belong to almost anybody.

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The mechanic may be perfectly sound, but there is no particular reason the idea has to belong to that brand.

There is a better question to ask. If we are going to give the customer another reason to engage with us, can that reason also reinforce something we want the brand to be known for?

That could be generosity, expertise, humour, sustainability, adventure, confidence, community or something else entirely. The promotion becomes more than a device for generating a short-term response. It gives the brand another opportunity to behave like itself.

Beth described this as one of the basic principles of good promotional marketing: the activity needs to embody the brand’s values. For brands selling through a third-party retailer, she adds another consideration. The idea also has to work for the retailer. A promotion that looks wonderful in the brand plan but does nothing useful for the business expected to put it in front of customers has a fairly obvious weakness.

That combination of brand, retailer and customer is where promotion becomes more useful than a tactical sales push.

Made you look, made you stare

Not every promotional idea needs to carry a grand message. Sometimes a much more immediate job needs doing: getting somebody to notice the product.

Beth recalled a wine promotion linked to Wimbledon. A neck collar used the unmistakable fluorescent colour of a tennis ball. From a distance, the bottles became a block of neon green in an otherwise familiar wine aisle. The point was not to explain every detail of the offer. It made people look and walk over to find out what was going on.

I like that example because it highlights something that is easy to forget. Visibility is not only a problem for new products.

Established products can become almost invisible through familiarity. Customers have walked past them before. They recognise the pack. They think they already know what it is. There is no reason to reconsider it today.

A promotion can interrupt that familiarity.

A collaboration, piece of retail theatre, unusual reward, limited edition, event or well-timed idea can give somebody a reason to look again. That second look might be all the product needs.

This feels particularly relevant in home and garden, where stores can contain a huge number of products competing for attention and many purchases are seasonal or occasional. There may be nothing wrong with the product at all. It may simply need a fresh reason to enter the customer’s field of view.

You can reduce the barrier without reducing the price

Another useful part of Beth’s interview was the range of jobs different promotional mechanics can perform.

Take a guarantee.

If someone is looking at a new product from a brand they do not know, or considering something at a higher price than they would normally pay, there is an obvious barrier: what if I spend the money and regret it?

A money-back, quality or performance guarantee can reduce that risk. Beth described variations ranging from straightforward cashback through to ‘Love me or I’m free’. The exact mechanic changes, but the principle is the same. You are giving the customer more confidence to try something they might otherwise leave on the shelf.

That is quite different from simply making the product cheaper. Price promotion can absolutely have a role, and Beth is pragmatic about that. But it is one option among many.

A gift with purchase adds something rather than taking something away. A prize draw creates the possibility of something bigger. VIP access or an early opportunity to buy can reward enthusiasm. A limited piece of merchandise or a collaboration can create desirability. A guarantee can take some of the perceived risk out of trial. An event can turn a product into a reason to visit.

The interesting question is not which mechanic is fashionable. It is what is stopping the customer from acting in the first place.

If people have not noticed the product, get their attention. If they are unsure whether it will work, give them confidence. If the category feels predictable, perhaps create some theatre. A brand with a passionate following might give that audience something they genuinely value. A retailer looking for footfall during a particular period needs a reason for people to come in.

Once you start there, the range of promotional possibilities becomes much wider.

A bold promotion doesn’t have to mean an unknown liability

One of the reasons brands can be cautious about promotions is risk.

If you offer a reward, guarantee or cashback mechanic and the response is far greater than expected, what happens to the budget? For a marketing team trying something new, the fear of creating an open-ended liability can be enough to send everyone back to safer, more familiar ideas.

That risk can be managed.

Specialist promotional agencies such as Umbrella can structure and underwrite promotions so the brand knows its exposure before the campaign begins. Instead of hoping redemption levels fall somewhere close to the forecast, the cost can be agreed upfront and the specialist takes responsibility for managing the promotional risk.

There is still work to do. Promotions need proper terms and conditions, compliance, data handling and fulfilment, and Beth was very clear that apparently simple ideas such as prize draws can carry more complexity than people expect.

But that is also why specialist support exists.

For a product brand that has never ventured much beyond a straightforward retail offer, knowing that the financial exposure can be controlled makes the more creative possibilities considerably less intimidating.

The mechanic comes after the objective

With years of experience in promotional marketing, Beth might reasonably be expected to have one golden rule. When I asked her for it, she declined and gave me three instead.

Know the problem or objective. Do something that is authentic to the brand. Make it easy and fair for the customer.

That is a useful discipline because promotional briefs can easily begin the other way around. Somebody likes an idea, spots what a competitor has done or decides the business needs a competition, and the objective gets reverse-engineered afterwards.

A mechanic is not a strategy.

If the problem is lack of awareness, a beautifully administered cashback offer may do very little because people still have to notice the product before they can respond to it. If the problem is hesitation around an unfamiliar premium product, a huge prize draw might create noise without addressing the concern that is actually stopping the sale.

Even price promotion illustrates the point. There are moments when reducing price is exactly the right thing to do. It can encourage trial, respond to trading conditions, support a retailer or help move stock. But Beth also points out what happens when products are perpetually ‘on offer’. Customers learn the promoted price and begin to treat that as the product’s real value. As she put it, eventually the shopper thinks: ‘that’s all your product is worth.’

The issue is not discounting. It is using the same lever so habitually that it starts creating a different behaviour from the one you intended.

Promotions are capable of changing what people notice, what they feel confident trying, how they think about the brand and when they decide to act. That deserves a little more thought than choosing the familiar option because it is easy to put on the sales plan.

The retailer needs something from it too

Product brands selling through retail have another complication. They are not the only business in the equation.

Beth talked about the sophistication of grocery retail, where brands and retailers can discuss media, reach, space, data and likely sales effects with relatively clear numbers attached. Garden retail is more fragmented. Different centres and groups have different capabilities, systems, media opportunities and ways of measuring activity. That can make a large, consistent programme harder to create.

I would not use that as a reason to ignore the opportunity. If anything, it makes the conversation between brands and retailers more important.

Beth suggested something refreshingly simple: spend more time understanding each other’s problems.

A supplier may want trial for a new line, better rate of sale or stronger brand awareness. The garden centre may want footfall, more reasons for customers to visit outside peak weekends, stronger community connections or help responding to a new competitor. Somewhere between those objectives there may be a much more interesting promotional idea than either side would have created alone.

Garden retail also has some useful raw material to work with. Stores are destinations rather than simply shelves. They run events. They have restaurants and cafes, knowledgeable teams, seasonal peaks, strong local communities and customers with genuine enthusiasm for particular parts of gardening. Product brands have their own experts, ambassadors, content, products and stories.

There is plenty there to create with.

The challenge is getting beyond the transactional conversation of listing, price and promotional calendar long enough to ask what might genuinely be useful to both businesses and interesting to the customer.

A good idea still has to be a fair one

Creativity does not remove the practical side of promotional marketing. If anything, a more ambitious idea makes the execution more important.

Beth is clear that promotions are regulated. Prize draws, data capture, claims, fulfilment and terms and conditions all need to be handled properly. Her Hoover example is the famous warning about what can happen when the value exchange gets badly out of balance, but she also talks about a more mundane problem: brands making an attractive promise in large type and then discovering that the quantity available makes the promise misleading.

Her principle is fairness. What are you asking the customer to do, and what are you genuinely giving them in return?

That is not the glamorous end of creativity, but it belongs in the thinking from the beginning. A promotion that generates attention and then disappoints people has not amplified the brand in a useful way.

The practicalities are also one reason specialist promotional partners can be valuable. The creative idea, fulfilment, data, compliance and retail execution have to join up. Good intentions are not much defence if the terms are wrong or the prize cannot be delivered.

An underused part of product marketing

Beth was careful not to present herself as a garden-sector expert, but her outside view was interesting. Compared with FMCG, she sees promotional marketing as relatively underused in garden.

I think she is right about the opportunity, although I would frame it slightly differently. The sector certainly runs promotions. What feels underused is the breadth of what promotion can be asked to do.

For product marketers, the familiar tools are easy to list: packaging, advertising, social content, PR, point of sale, retailer activity, websites, email, video. Promotion can sit alongside all of them, or run through several of them at once.

It can amplify the brand’s personality or values. It can create a reason to notice an established product again. It can remove some of the risk from trial. It can reward enthusiasm, create participation, generate useful data, support a retailer objective or give the customer a reason to act now.

Sometimes the right answer will be money off. Sometimes it will be a guarantee, prize, gift, experience, piece of content, collaboration or something we have not thought of yet.

That last possibility is probably the most interesting.

Because if promotion is treated as a creative marketing tool rather than a box to fill in on the sales plan, we do not have to begin with a list of standard mechanics at all. We can begin with the brand, the customer and the commercial problem, then create the idea that fits.

The promotion can be the creative idea.