A Quantitative Study of Mixed Methods Marketing including Temporary Price Reductions, Secondary Locations, and Coupons

A challenge for any company is to identify which of the myriad types of promotions run every year are the most profitable. Once the decision is made to measure the Return on Investment of marketing programs, a method must be chosen that can address the multitude of different marketing programs being run. The focus of this research was to measure the effect on sales of an individual Consumer Product Goods Company based on several different kinds of marketing programs which the company has utilized. Previous research has focused on measuring the effects of either single marketing programs or a combination of two marketing programs. This study attempted to measure which single event marketing program or multiple event marketing programs generated the largest net retail dollar sales. The research method for this study was a quantitative, non-experimental design using archival data from a single company. The data used for this research was net retail dollar sales and promotion spending data provided by the company at the UPC level by day for a two-year period for three retailers including a major supermarket chain, mass merchandiser, and dollar store chain. The objective of the research was to determine which marketing programs, or combination, including promotion dollars, display dollars, coupon dollars, promotion and display dollars, or promotion and coupon dollars, had the largest impact on net retail dollar sales. Multiple regression analysis was performed using SPSS to understand the relationships between the different types of marketing funds and net retail dollars, or sales, generated. The results indicated that no one marketing program or combination of programs had a statistically significant effect on net retail dollar sales, although promotion dollars followed by display dollars and the combination of promotion and display dollars were moderately significant. Further study is needed to identify other factors influencing retail dollar sales.