A STUDY ON PREFERRED MEDIA OPTIONS FOR CONVEYING SALES PROMOTION OFFERS BY FAST FOOD RESTAURANTS

Fast food restaurants regularly come up with sales promotional offers to increase sales during a particular period. The success of such campaigns is decided by how widely these offers are publicised, before and during the promotional period. Hence decision making for engaging right media to convey the offers becomes critical. The paper aims to study various options of media that the target group are exposed to, and study the preferred medium out of them as per ranks given. The target market is particularly the youth or college going students who are exposed to thousands of messages daily from various firms. The college students seek information about such offers as they have to manage their expenses on limited monthly allowances. It was found that youth eats out frequently. They choose restaurants with offers over the ones that don't. SMS is the most preferred medium followed by outdoor media. Reliability on friends or word of mouth publicity was the least. The paper concludes that expenditure on sending SMS and buying outdoor media should continue. Innovations in types of sales promotional offers should be introduced in such a way that potential for word of mouth publicity is tapped, e.g. referral schemes.