Buy 15 postcards for £2! Buy 4 pastries for £2! Promotions, they are all over Portobello Road and people love it. Is there not a better feeling than getting more for your dollar? Promotions seem to drive Portobello Road. Forget about the already low prices that vendors start their products at, but sales on Portobello Road make the average consumer feel rich. Part of offering deals is to give the customer the feeling that their purchasing power parity is even greater from what they originally perceive, hence influencing customers to buy more. Vendors would like to get rid of their product and so promotions are the best way to clear their inventories. Promotions offer the consumers incentives to buy and in a way it is a win-win situation. The customer is happy because they got what they wanted and more at a good price and the vendor is able to finish out the day with a lot less inventory from what they started out with. All of the selling is done person-to-person when making a purchase on Portobello Road and this allows customers to have more of a relationship with vendors. Sometimes customers can influence vendors by bargaining in order to get what they want at the prices they want. Another advantage for the vendors doing business on Portobello Road is that they do not have to think about spending even a fraction of what regular businesses spend on advertising. They do not have to create a large advertising campaign for the year and in fact they don’t have to worry too much about advertising at all. In a way, the vendors on Portobello Road run on a pull strategy, minus the advertising issues that other businesses have to strategize about. The day that I went to Portobello Road, the streets were crowded with people just looking to buy from the various vendors. Vendors on Portobello Road know that customers are going to be coming to them every weekend and they don’t even have to spend any money on advertising. I saw vendors that displayed their prices with an Expo marker on cardboard. All that the vendors have to worry about is making sure that they have a supply of goods to sell. Since the vendors know that the market will be flooded with potential customers they put their efforts into luring the people to spend money at their stand instead of the competitors’ with promotions.
 |
| Credit: Dr. Harlan Spotts |
No comments:
Post a Comment