Introduction
Promotion is used by organisations to communicate with customers with respect to their product offerings. In this sense, promotion is one side of the communication process with customers. Market research, in which suppliers seek to elicit information on consumer requirements from consumers, is the complementary component of the communication process. The following summarises this very simply: Promotion → Producer Customer ← Market research In some forms of promotion and service delivery, communication in both directions can be achieved simultaneously, and since two-way communication is the only real form of communication, promotion which is associated with two-way communication is to be encouraged. Examples of such two-way promotion emerge largely from the contexts of services marketing and relationship marketing. In services marketing, for example, promotion can be part of the service delivery. Exchanges between the service agent and the customer can elicit information about customer requirements, and also permit the service agent to explain the organisation’s products and how these might meet the customer’s needs. Similar kinds of exchanges can occur in the relationship marketing interest in business-to-business marketing transactions where the sales person is a significant agent in the establishment of relationships between customer and the organisation. A more formularised approach, the use of loyalty and reward cards, in, say, supermarkets, offers another approach which embeds both promotional and market research activities. Mercer (1996), in emphasising that communication must be a two-way process, says (p. 309):
The ideal form of promotion is the conversation which takes places between the expert sales professional and his or her customer. It is interactive and conversation is specific to the needs of both. Other forms of promotion, which deal in