The first part of this chapter is concerned with the tactical aspects of the marketing plan for the business. The Product, Price and Place aspects of the marketing mix are essentially the policy decisions covered in the previous chapter, but the Promotion aspects (achieving the sales) are more tactical in that they relate to the methods that will be used to project and present the other three aspects to the market and the customers. In particular, there is a need to distinguish the marketing aspects of promotion from the sales aspects. Advertising and promotion create interest in a business or its products and services, and in the case of direct sales organizations, it is also the sales mechanism that takes the orders. However, for the majority of businesses, the marketing and promotion activities alone do not always generate sales orders. There needs to be a supporting mechanism in the form of staff who are actively selling to customers, or an order-taking and processing system, to convert interest and enquiries into actual orders.

The chapter will also examine some of the issues associated with exporting and e-commerce, two increasingly overlapping areas. The first of these is an obvious potential opportunity for any firm considering expansion. The second is a subject that no modern business can afford to ignore, as Internet marketing offers small firms the opportunity to break into wider geographical and export markets hitherto inaccessible to them. This chapter relates to Units A2, B1, B2, B3, B4 and B5 of...