Abstract:
Sales promotion has become an inevitably important marketing tool adopted and implemented by
many organizations in attempt to boost sales particularly in the short-term. When well developed
and implemented, sales promotion have the potential to turn the company’s sales around
particularly in the short term and this has become an essential motivating factor for most
organizations and marketing practitioners who operate in highly competitive industries like that
of the breweries industry. The main objective of this research is to study the effect of sales
promotion strategies and how it influences consumer buying decision of beer products in
Ethiopia. Furthermore, this study also seeks to highlight the prospects and importance of sales
promotion to an organization with particular emphasis on Heineken Breweries S.C. The
researcher employed mixed research methodology in undertaking this research.
The promotional tools considered for this research included (1)price discount which involves
discounts offered consumers at reduced price from the regular price of a product,
(2)premiums
(Buy-one-Get-One free and under cork promotions) which also involves product or service
offered free or at a relatively low price in return for the purchase of one or many products or
services,
(3) free sampling which also involves offering customers to try the samples of products
without charging any cost and finally (4)point of sale display which also involves display of
products and offerings through in store display such as menu boards, posters and brochures.
The analysis part of this research incorporated different techniques to analyze the data from this
study.
Descriptive statistics (frequency and percentage) were employed to describe and analyze the
demographics of the research. Secondly, descriptive statistics with particular emphasis on mean
and standard deviation were used to describe the opinion of the respondents on the various
variables used in this study. Next, Pearson’s correlation was used to determine whether there is a
relationship between the dependent and independent variables and their effect on the outcome of
the study. And finally, correlation tests were conducted to test each hypothesis.
Probability and non-probability sampling methods were employed in sampling the respondents
for this research and 384 respondents who were randomly selected from Addis Ababa city were
sampled for this research. Both secondary and primary data were used for this research and
survey questionnaires were employed to collect primary data for this research.
