Trade Sales Promotion Strategies and Marketing Performance in the Soft Drink Industries in Nigeria

Abstract

Rapid changes in technology, over production, shortened product life cycles, increased competition owing toreduced barriers to domestic and international trade, mass communication and globalization have all contributedto the need for a firm to have distinctive capabilities; which create a competitive advantage over others. We areinclined to believe that fully utilized, competent and well-articulated trade sales promotion strategies constitute acompetitive advantage. With the notion that trade sales promotion strategies positively correlates with marketingperformance, firms view trade sales promotion strategy incompetence with grave concern. The effect of poortrade promotion strategy performance is not limited to firms alone since organizations can and do experiencesub-optimal or out-right poor performance; but also to the economy as a whole. The aggregate businessperformance of a country’s economic unit shapes its economy, since a nation’s wealth is measured mostly interms of its GDP. Among the factors critical to business profitability; fresh concerns about the efficacy of tradepromotion strategies is sparsely researched. This informs the research interest in this regard, recognizing theunique role of trade sales promotion strategies that distinguishes it from other marketing communicationmethods, and its critical roles in pushing and creating traffic for the manufacturer’s product. With a surveyresearch design, a regression model was formulated to incorporate eleven hypotheses of interests. Quantitativedata were collected through a 5-point Likert-type scale questionnaire. A total of 234 copies of questionnaire werecompleted by senior promotion and sales executives of two major soft drink manufacturing firms and theiraccredited distributors in Nigeria. We adopted Pearson’s ‘r’ and stepwise regression with itsconstituents-ANOVA and T-test to determine the trade sales promotion activities that actually influencemarketing performance activities in these firms. Two of the hypothesized trade sales promotion strategies wereretained and adjudged relevant in determining marketing performance levels. Our findings reveal that Tradepromotion strategies affect marketing performance through the use of trade allowances and trade contests.Notwithstanding this fact, the study notes that the firms are not at their optimal levels in both their tradepromotion strategies and marketing performance. We therefore recommend that for optimal levels to be achieved,they should adopt trade promotion strategies that emphasize trade allowances and trade contests.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 9 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.