Ch. 18 – Sales Promotion and Personal Selling

As we learned last chapter, advertising offers the consumer a reason to buy; but sales promotion offers an incentive to buy. The marketing managers use sales promotion to increase the effectiveness of their promotional efforts. Sadly, Porsche isn’t frequent in regards to offering a bunch of promotions but they have been doing well without them. (Previous Post On Sales)

Sales promotion is usually targeted towards two distinctly different markets. Consumer sales promotion or trade sales promotion. Consumer sales promotion is targeted to the ultimate consumer market and trade sales promotion, is directed to members of the marketing channel such as wholesalers and retailers. Porsche targets the wholesalers and retailers market, for the fact that majority of their products are sold through authorized dealers. With that said, it’s actually up to the authorized dealers to understand their type of consumers and how to implement certain sales promotions.

Porsche enthusiasts, who are part of the larger group of car enthusiast, are in two types of buyer groups, loyal customers and competitor’s customers. These loyal customers experience sales promotion offers like maintenance plan and reduced Porsche parts promotions from their dealers. Offers like the “maintenance plan” and "reduced Porsche parts" from London and Saskatchewan Porsche dealers are examples of how the company is reinforcing the loyalty behavior with promotions. What's more, is that all these promotions that differ between each dealer, can all be found on the official Porsche website.These promotions, despite being few, are great ways to entice Porsche owners and future Porsche owners in beginning or strengthening their loyalty with the company.

The Porsche personal can’t go unmentioned. The Porsche salesmen aren't the typical pompous sales personnel who think the car can sell itself in their 80's demeanor.  The sales team is very knowledgeable and helpful. They never try to push you on a car that is more than what you want, and will do all they can to make the deal work. The service at most Porsche dealers are like no other, they will always spend time with you even if you just to be educated.