Understanding Promotional Offers

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Promotional Offers

A PromtionalOffer is a specific proposition to customers that specifies a reward and customer behavioral criteria for earning a reward.   The recognition and issue of the reward is captured through a retail transaction, customer order, rebate claim, rebate redemption or other customer interaction.  Each of these point in time customer actions captures customer actions and relevant context information to determine what (if any) reward is earned, what conditions triggered the issue of the reward and when and where it was triggered.  Promotional offers are one type of a PromotionInitiative which is a program or higher level effort to cultivate consumer demand.  In addition to PromotionalOffers, retailers also create ConversionInitiatives (a subtype of PromotionInitiative).  Typically a promotional offer is focused on creating demand for a certain product or group of products or services.  A ConversionInitiative is focused on rewarding consumers in order to convince them to transition from one state (like being a prospect) to a new state (like becoming a customer).  The concept of conversion is discussed in detail in Consumer-Customer Journey.

As illustrated below, Rewards are the concrete discounts, rebates, loyalty point accruals or other benefits that customers actually receive.  Rewards, as shown here may result from a PromotionalOffer and/or from a CustomerMembershipEarnedRewardTier (i.e. the customer's membership in a retailer member-based program).  A PromotionalOffer is a call to action on the part of a customer with the promise of a reward.  The Reward and its supporting entity types is the benefit received at a result of a customer taking the prescribed promotional action.

Figure 26 - Promotional Offers and Supporting Entity Types

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Promotions may be tied to specific a specific TimeGroup.  This defines time-based offer constraints that limit when a reward may be earned.