Promotion Decisions

Red bull has always been on top when it comes to promotions. It promotes heavily through sport events and competitions. Red Bull's integrated marketing communications mix has been so successful that the company has created an entirely new energy drink category and has become multimillion dollar brand among competition from beverage kings like Coca-Cola and Pepsi. In less than 20 year, Red Bull has become the energy drink market leader by skilfully connecting with the global youth.

Promotion (also one of the 4P’s of marketing) which is known as marketing communication is one of the major attribute for any of the product or services. For any brand one of the major issues faced is that of sustaining its market share. They need to trade off between maintain their brand in the market coupled with making acceptable profits. To attract more customers and to increase their market share, companies adopt various promotion techniques which help in generating revenue. For this purpose there are 8 major modes of communication in marketing communication mix as follows:

·       Advertising

·       Sales Promotion

·       Event and experiences

·       Public relations and publicity

·       Direct marketing

·       Word-of-mouth marketing

Advertising:

Red Bull looks at little but effective television advertisements. Animation ads with the slogan “red bull gives you wings” are catchy and effective. In addition to this, they also do celebrity endorsements (Popular rap artist Eminem) and own a record label Red Bull Records. They are also very active on social media.

Sales Promotion:

Examples of devices used in sales promotion include coupons, samples, premiums, point-of-purchase (POP) displays, contests, rebates, and sweepstakes. Incase of Redbull, they focus on only sampling for this bit. Redbull girls dressed in red bull colors, riding customized cars (again in the colors of red bull) give out free samples in youth events like fests, football matches etc.

Public relations and publicity:

By associating the drink’s image with these activities, the company seeks to promote a “cool” public image and raise brand power. The energy drink has created a market for over 150 related types of merchandise like Red Rooster and Blue Lightning.

Direct marketing:

This is a channel-agnostic form of advertising that allows businesses to communicate straight to the customer, with advertising techniques that can include interactive consumer websites, online display ads, fliers, catalog distribution, promotional letters, outdoor advertising etc. Red Bull believes in direct marketing, however does not resort to outdoor advertising. They limit their direct marketing to interactive websites and online ads.

Word of mouth:

From the beginning, the marketing for red bull was conducted via word of mouth and viral marketing in the youth oriented underground.