Effect of marketing promotion on sales in perfume industry

<p>The domain of my investigation is marketing as part of management course. In the work I consider the influence of various marketing actions on the sales. My data are the sales taken from perfume industry in Russia in category of mass-market during the 2-years period (from January 2012 until December 2013), representing the sales of one company, distributing in 7 networks of drogerie format. Based on marketing and merchandising books of Mullin, Cummins, Kotler and Doyle I decided to compare two different types of actions: the action for reduced price and the action by which a consumer is given a gift if he chooses some particular good. From obtained results I have not found a common pattern since coefficients of regressions for holding promo-actions were significant only for part of networks and different in their sign. As well in this work I have used differences-in-differences method, which helps to analyze how the treatment influences on the dependent variable. I chose all cases, at which one product in two networks was sold without action in one period (period before treatment) and in the next period (next consecutive month) the action was held only in one out of two networks. This analysis helped me to find that there is an effect of promo-actions on sales, but that the effectiveness depends also on the product, networks and period. However, the paper shows that sales in perfume market are mostly explained by the season, moreover by month (period of sales) and price. There are also various factors unincluded in the regression and that are qualitative, therefore more difficult to calculate and estimate and include in the model. Such factors are the&nbsp;assortment, presence of testers, presence of merchandise, laying out, and stuff in the shop. They influence as on sales in general, as on sales in the period of holding action. But the investigation of their effect on sales was not my initial aim and it can be applied in further work.</p>