P
Packaging The activities of designing and producing the container or wrapper for a product. Patronage reward Cash or other award for the regular use of a certain company’s products or services.
Percentage-of-sales method Setting the promotion budget at a certain percentage of current or forecasted sales or as a percentage of the unit sales price.
Perception The process by which people select, organize, and interpret information to form a meaningful picture of the world.
Performance review The stage of the business buying process in which the buyer rates its satisfaction with suppliers, deciding whether to continue, modify, or drop them.
Personal selling Personal presentation by the firm’s sales force for the purpose of making sales and building customer relationships.
Personality A person’s distinguishing psychological characteristics that lead to relatively consistent and lasting responses to his or her own environment.
Physical distribution (marketing logistics) The tasks involved in planning, implementing, and controlling the physical flow of materials, final goods, and related information from points of origin to points of consumption to meet customer requirements at a profit.
Point-of-purchase (POP) promotion Display and demonstration that takes place at the point of purchase or sale.
Political environment Laws, government agencies, and pressure groups that influence and limit various organizations and individuals in a given society.
Portfolio analysis A tool by which management identifies and evaluates the various businesses that make up the company.
Postpurchase behavior The stage of the buyer decision process in which consumerstake further action after purchase based on their satisfaction or dissatisfaction.
Preapproach The step in the selling process in which the salesperson learns as much as possible about a prospective cus¬tomer before making a sales call.
Premium Good offered either free or at low cost as an incentive to buy a product.
Presentation The step in the selling process in which the salesperson tells the product “story” to the buyer, showing how the product will make or save money for the buyer.
Price The amount of money charged for a product or service, or the sum of the values that consumers exchange for the benefits of having or using the product or service.
Price elasticity A measure of the sensitivity of demand to changes in price.
Price pack (cents-off deal) Reduced price that is marked by the producer directly on the label or package.
Primary data Information collected for the specific purpose at hand.
Primary demand The level of total demand for all brands of a given product or service—for example, the total demand for motorcycles.
Private brand (or store brand) A brand created and owned by a reseller of a product or service.
Problem recognition The first stage of the business buying process in which someone in the company recognizes a problem or need that can be met by acquiring a good or a service.
Product Anything that can be offered to a market for attention, acquisition, use, or consumption that might satisfy a want or need. It includes physical objects, services, events, persons, places, organizations, and ideas.
Product adaptation Adapting a product to meet local conditions or wants in foreign markets.
Product bundle pricing Combining several products and offering the bundle at a reduced price.
Product concept The idea that consumers will favor products that offer the most quality, performance, and features and that the organization should therefore devote its energy to making continuous product improvements.
Product development A strategy for company growth by offering modified or new products to current market segments. Developing the product concept into a physical product in order to ensure that the product idea can be turned into a workable product.
Product invention Creating new products or services for foreign markets.
Product life cycle (PLC) The course of a product’s sales and profits over its lifetime. It involves five distinct stages: product development, introduction, growth, maturity, and decline.
Product line A group of products that are closely related because they function in a similar manner, are sold to the same customer groups, are marketed through the same types of outlets, or fall within given price ranges.
Product line pricing Setting the price steps between various products in a product line based on cost differences between the products, customer evaluations of different features, and competitors’ prices.
Product-market expansion grid A portfolio-planning tool for identifying company growth opportunities through market penetration, market development, product development, or diversification.
Product mix / assortment The set of all product lines and items that a particular seller offers for sale.
Product position The way the product is defined by consumers on important attributes—the place the product occupies in consumers’ minds relative to competing products.
Product quality The ability of a product to perform its functions; it includes the product’s overall durability, reliability, precision, ease of operation and repair, and other valued attributes.
Product sales force structure A sales force organization under which salespeople specialize in selling only a portion of the company’s products or lines.
Product specification The stage of the business buying process in which the buying organization decides on and specifies the best technical product characteristics for a needed item.
Production concept The philosophy that consumers will favor products that are available and highly affordable and that management should therefore focus on improving production and distribution efficiency.
Promotional pricing Temporarily pricing products below the list price, and sometimes even below cost, to increase short-run sales.
Proposal solicitation The stage of the business buying process in which the buyer invites qualified suppliers to submit proposals.
Prospecting The step in the selling process in which the salesperson identifies qualified potential customers.
Psychographic segmentation Dividing a market into different groups based on social class, lifestyle, or personality characteristics.
Psychological pricing A pricing approach that considers the psychology of prices and not simply the economics; the price is used to say something about the product.
Public Any group that has an actual or potential interest in or impact on an organization’s ability to achieve its objectives.
Public relations Building good relations with the company’s various publics by obtaining favorable publicity, building up a good “corporate image,” and handling or heading off unfavorable rumors, stories, and events. Major PR tools include press relations, product publicity, corporate communications, lobbying, and public service.
Pull strategy A promotion strategy that calls for spending a lot on advertising and consumer promotion to build up consumer demand. If the strategy is successful, consumers will ask their retailers for the product, the retailers will ask the wholesalers, and the wholesalers will ask the producers.
Purchase decision The stage of the buyer decision process in which the consumer actually buys the product.
Push strategy A promotion strategy that calls for using the sales force and trade promotion to push the product through channels. The producer promotes the product to wholesalers, the wholesalers promote to retailers, and the retailers promote to consumers.
Q
