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Promoting the idea of blood donation as well as the successful recruitment of blood donors represents substantial marketing challenges. For example, blood products have a short shelf life, donation is invasive, the industry is heavily regulated, and safety issues restrict the number of eligible donors. Moreover, many organizations that collect blood are non-profit services that are not equipped to make use of many of the tools of marketing and promotion. In the for-profit world, organizations are increasingly using sponsorships to enhance the effectiveness of their marketing expenditures. This paper reports on the use of a sponsorship to increase blood drive donations. The sponsorship used a standing annual holiday promotion/ stakeholder appreciation campaign conducted by a large local group of gastroenterologists. Linkage of the sponsorship to a local blood drive resulted in increased response rates from donors and in the number of units of blood collected. Implications of the use of sponsorships for future blood drives are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Personal selling and personal sales professionals use a number of tools to develop customer relationships. Among these, the sales presentation offers a number of advantages to the sales representative, including strategic advantages. Yet a review of the sales literature reveals that most research on personal selling tools tends to view the sales presentation as a tactical, not strategic, tool. Moreover, very little attention has been given to the special needs of services marketing and how sales presentations can add strategic value to the service marketing mix. This article reviews the literature on the role of sales presentations in relation to trust, relationship developments and communication theory and suggests that sales presentations may be used as a strategic tool for developing customer relationships. The value of this new strategic view of sales presentations for the marketing of services is also explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]