Cooperative Advertising

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Every day we are bombarded by promotional messages. The morning paper promotes sales through advertisements, our television promotes new products, and our car radio broadcasts spots promoting a company’s image. Each of these messages is part of a promotional strategy designed to inform, persuade, or influence us to purchase a good or a service. Promotion is one of the four activities in the marketing mix, and is dependent on the other three.) It is through such instyler promotions that a company hopes to increase or stabilize its sales.

In order to accomplish the basic objectives of informing, persuading, and influencing, promotional strategies are developed to push or pull products through the marketing channels. A push strategy is a promotional effort that persuades middlemen to sell a product aggressively. This strategy relies heavily on personal selling to wholesalers and retailers, and attempts to influence them by providing promotional allowances for displays, special discounts, brochures, pamphlets, posters, and cooperative advertising, an arrangement whereby the manufacturer shares the cost of local advertising. This push strategy, is especially important to companies competing in markets such as food stores where shelf space is very restricted.

For example, a large General Mills sales force regularly visits food stores to inform managers and buyers of new products and special discounts and to insure that General Mills products are getting proper shelf space (eye level is most desirable).
An alternate strategy is the pull strategy, which is a promotional effort designed to stimulate consumer demand for products and services through the use of advertising and sales promotion. The idea is to persuade the ultimate consumer to request a specific product from retailers so that the middlemen will be forced to carry it. This strategy is commonly used for health care products, books, and records.