“P”

Payback Period: the time taken for a new product to recover its initial investment cost and to generate profits.

Perceptual Mapping: a tool used in Marketing Research for charting the way individuals selected from the target market perceive different companies, products or brands.

Personal Selling: a marketing channel used in the form of promotion by utilising the services of a sales team or the distinctive character of an individual.

Persuasive Advertising: advertising intended to persuade rather than to inform or remind. Through a mix of communications highlighting product benefits and product efficacy

Place: one of the four controllable marketing mix variables (Product, Price and Promotion). Where the target market can purchase the products.

Planning Horizon: the total time-span covered by a firm’s marketing programme for a given period.

Point-of-Purchase: normally in a retail/in-store environment and allows for consumers to readily access the product.

Population: in Marketing Research, the total homogeneous group that the research may study; also known as the ‘Universe’.

Population Characteristics: a populations variables including; age, gender, income, marital status, education, nationality, religion, etc. upon which a ‘population’ may be segmented and further identified into unique marketing profiles.

Potential Market: all the individuals and organisations in a market who have some level of desire or interest in the product or service.

Press Release: a structured announcement released to the news media by a government body, organisation or firm, usually to obtain free publicity or to offset some negative reaction to it or its products.

Price: the value agreed upon by the buyer and the seller, one of the four controllable variables (with Product, Promotion and Place) of the marketing mix.

Price Competition: a competitive strategy in which price is used as the major means of differentiating the product. This is more common with commodity goods or goods with low involvement.

Primary Data: information that is obtained directly from first-hand market sources by means of surveys, observation or experimentation.

Product: a mix of need-satisfying tangible and intangible elements offered to a buyer by a seller.

Product Category: the specific generic to which a good or service belongs; for example, while a Mars bar is a brand name, the product category to which it belongs is confectionery.

Product Manager: an individual given responsibility or ownership for the planning and co-ordinating of a firm’s marketing activities related to a single product, product line or market.

Product Mix: the variety of product lines and items manufactured or distributed by an entity.

Promotion: one of the four marketing mix known as the Four P’s

Prospecting Plan: a systematic approach to finding new prospective customers from a customer group of ‘suspects’ who are in the target market.

Puffing or Puffery: the legitimate practice of making obviously exaggerated claims in advertising, e.g. “cleaner than clean”.

Pull Strategy: promotion to existing and new customers with direct and indirect marketing communications

Push Strategy: promotion to members of the marketing channel via in-store or on the road sales teams (representatives, sales consultants) rather than promotion to end-users to facilitate the flow of a good or service from producer to final consumer. This can include incentives and rebates for the salesperson.

Pyramid Selling: a selling system, now illegal in Australia, in which members of a sales team derive their earnings by selling to newly, introduced members of the distribution network at exorbitant prices rather than to end-users. Normally the first off receive the dividend whereas those last-on will find it statistically impossible to bring in new members to the pyramid scheme. Some forms of Network marketing skirt with the concepts of Pyramid Selling through other guises.