Marketing Essay Example: Coupon Promotional Tactic

As the Marketing Manager of a new restaurant, I carried out a nonprobability sample among my acquaintances to establish whether coupons would be a successful promotional tool to utilize and in what circumstances tickets would be an incentive for repeat business and when they would not. I used the nonprobability sample to save time and finances by hand picking the respondents because I knew the acquaintances and their precedence would fit the market segmentation for the restaurant. According to the survey, coupons would be a successful promotional tactic to utilize. The most common coupons among the respondents centered on the best-cost saving and family-friendly saving coupons. The tickets identified would be the buy one meal get on free restaurant coupons, the 20% off the total check coupons, and kids eat free coupons.

The survey identified that the cost saving coupons would bring clients into the restaurant and given a good customer experience, it would help build a repeat business. Mainly, the best coupon for a repeat business would be kids eat free. Kids meals are cheap, and, therefore, the costs of the meal allow the strategy to be regularly implemented. The restaurant may manage to spill over from a coupon tactic to a weekly night to foster business on the usually slower evenings. Nevertheless, the coupons may not work in places that serve travelers. Moreover, even though the clients may enjoy their experience at the restaurant, they may not have an option to return if they are only passing through the area. Additionally, the cost saving coupons may not be useful if the restaurants target market is the affluent clientele where money is not a motivating aspect than middle-class customers.

Plan to win back Lost Customers

The first step will involve conducting a market research to establish the reasons for the customers to shift from the independent bookstore to the large bookstore chain and to investigate why the customers who did not leave stayed. In the second phase, the independent bookstore will conduct an external analysis to identify the marketing strategies of competitors. The relevant aspects to look at include prices of books, extra services offered to clients such as author signings, types of books, authors, and major topics. The third step is to analyze the data collected to identify the customers needs and to help the bookstore to develop strategies that will contribute to meet those needs. Mainly, this will involve developing marketing campaigns and promotional tactics that will help bring back previous customers to the independent bookstore (Boone & Kurtz, 2015). The data will also play a significant role in enabling the bookstore to distinguish itself from the rival large bookstore chain based on the reasons some customers did not leave.

The fourth step will involve implementing the changes. The first program will require adopting a customer loyalty program that rewards clients with redeemable loyalty points, based on the amount spent in the bookstore. Then, the business will introduce coupons (Boone & Kurtz, 2015) such as buy five books get a children book free for particular authors and genres with each sale. Furthermore, promoting new authors or titles with coupons will generate interests of the lost customers. Additionally, the independent bookstore will introduce a Book Club membership where for every month a customer buys a specific book; they are registered to attend a book club with a special guest to talk about the book. Notably, Boone and Kurtz (2015) assert that these tactics will give clients a feeling of being valued by getting tangible rewards for their loyalty.

Reference

Boone, L. E., & Kurtz, D. L. (2015). Contemporary marketing. Cengage learning.