Sales promotion in Asia: successful strategies for Singapore and Malaysia

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to address the globalisation/culture issue by comparing two Asian countries in which there has been limited prior research regarding their respective supermarket industries, namely, Singapore and Malaysia.

Design/methodology/approach

The research design adopted a case-study approach, with two general cases (the New Singaporean and Malaysian supermarket retail industries), made up of two embedded cases each (retailers and manufacturers operating within each country).

Findings

The overall finding is that despite prior assumptions that suitability is reliant on product type or country choice, there are a number of sales promotion techniques that are inherently suited to the supermarket industry as a whole. The majority of these “inherently suitable” techniques are price-based and the conclusion is then that these techniques can be used globally. Value-added techniques, on the other hand, should be localised to fit with the market in which they are being applied.

Practical implications

Tools best suited to the grocery product sales environment appear to be price-based or linked to price reductions (i.e. price discounting and discount-linked point-of-purchase (P-O-P) or end-of-aisle (E-O-A) displays combination and volume offers), suggesting that those tools which are inherently suitable to the industry are likely to meet retailers' shorter-term objectives rather than manufacturers' longer-term ones. The difficulty faced by manufacturers, then, is aligning their sales promotion objectives with the tools that are best able to achieve results in the supermarket environment.

Originality/value

Globalisation of the supermarket industry has also meant that marketers continue to need a better understanding of cross-cultural issues and their effect and national culture frameworks can be used to develop marketing theories which are suited to a particular region. The current research identifies preferences for different sales promotion techniques in the two nationally similar, yet ethnically diverse, countries under study, as well as examining application of these techniques in the retail environment.

Citation

McNeill, L. (2013), "Sales promotion in Asia: successful strategies for Singapore and Malaysia", Asia Pacific Journal of Marketing and Logistics, Vol. 25 No. 1, pp. 48-69. https://doi.org/10.1108/13555851311290939