The Art of Gaining and Retaining Customers

Revision with unchanged content. As classical mass advertising is losing effectiveness to generate revenues, mar­keting managers attach importance to alternative methods to gain and retain customers. In particular, sales promotion activities are popular to give pro­spect customers an incentive to buy, whereas the relationship approach aims at establishing a long-lasting bond between provider and customer. In order to find out whether these tendencies provoke the desired actions, a survey among German consumers was conducted, investigating their attitude to­wards determined marketing tools and each tool¿s impact on the purchase decision-making process. The existing deal-proneness towards the promotion tools samples, coupons, premiums, loyalty cards and sweepstakes and their ability to provoke purchase and re-purchase was examined. Further, this re­search states possibilities to connect short-term activities with the long-rang­ing relationship approach and is therefore of high value for marketing mana­ger and consultants, company management, lectures and students of busi­ness and media & communication studies; as well as for everyone who is curi­ous to know which promotion tool is the German¿s favourite one.