Marketing Management, 16th Edition

Major Incentive Decisions

In using incentives, a company must establish its objectives, select the tools, develop the program, implement and control it, and evaluate the results.

Establishing the Objectives of Incentives

The objectives of incentives derive from basic marketing objectives for the offering. Depending on whether a manufacturer’s promotional activity is focused on consumers or retailers, incentives have different objectives:

For consumer incentives, objectives include encouraging more frequent purchases or the purchase of larger-sized units among users, fostering trial of one’s product among nonusers, and attracting switchers away from competitors’ brands. If some of the brand switchers would not have otherwise tried the brand, ...