Caught between TiVo and the 500+ digital cable channels that are weakening their mass advertising strategy, marketers are turning more and more to sales promotions to get their sales message across.

In the last few years, the percentage of ad budgets earmarked for this sector has increased and there has been a proliferation of sales promotion companies ready to aid big-budget advertisers for an often steep, though deserved, fee.

But if you don't have the budget to hire yet another agency or would like to see your present agency or marketing team come up with cash-register-ringing promotions themselves, because no one knows the business better, where do you and your team turn?

Also, what about the countless promotional proposals that come across your desk? How do you determine which are right for you and your brand?

And most important, how do you ensure the integrity and proper targeting of your brand when developing and executing promotions?

Integration has become a key concept in marketing of late, and for good reason. How do you make sure your sales promotions communicate every aspect of your brand or product, all the time, without causing harm to either?

Too often promotions come about because a vendor, TV station, network or distributor submits a less-than-perfect promotional concept to you. You may choose to go ahead with the promotion, but only because you have nothing better in your arsenal. Sometimes, a marketing team at another company thinks their brand is a “good-fit” with yours, but no one knows how best to exploit the relationship. Other times, you get your team together for an impromptu brainstorming session that may lead to some good ideas. But are they the best?

A Matrix

I've recently developed what I call the BrandFit Matrix, a methodology that requires nothing more than a pencil and a pad of paper (or a flip chart and color marker, if you prefer). This strategy also requires at least one brain, though the more brains you can bring to the exercise the better the resulting ideas are apt to be.

Like a positioning map or SWOT Analysis, the BrandFit Matrix isn't something you buy; rather, it is a technique that helps you and your team conceptualize on-strategy sales promotion ideas.

How can the BrandFit Matrix help you and your team? Well, for starters ,the BrandFit Matrix will hopefully allow you to do the following:

• Quickly brainstorm on-target consumer and trade promotions
  
  
• Identify which of these promotions best meet your needs
  
  
• Ensure that your collective promotions communicate all pertinent information
  
  
• Delegate the task of determining whether a promotion is a win-win or a pass
  
  
• Strengthen a weak promotion or proposal
  
  
• Build the most strategically integrated promotion to serve your brand

Getting Started

We start with something every product and brand should have in today's marketplace: the positioning statement, or what is sometimes referred to as the unique selling proposition (USP).

Once we have the positioning statement or USP, we can quickly create winning promotions by following eight steps.

Step 1: Pinpoint the key words in the brand or product positioning statement

We'll call these the keys of the positioning statement or USP. For example: Brand X is mom's best choice in laundry detergent because it is a tougher and more powerful cleaner.

Step 2: Order and group the keys in terms of importance and likeness

          mom     laundry/clean     powerful     tough

Step 3: Identify additional meanings and double entendres

Often, the antonym of a key word can be helpful.

Here we want to make sure that we are covering all the meanings of the keys (e.g., value can mean low price, more volume, quality ingredients—or all three). This is the most important step in building our matrix, so we need to spend a lot of our time here. However, if you wrote the positioning statement to begin with, this step will likely be second nature to you.