ASSESSMENT OF THE PRACTICES OF DIRECT MARKETING TOOLS ON CUSTOMER AWARENESS AND BUSINESS PERFORMANCE: A CASE OF KONKA GROUP COMPANY LTD.

The nerve centre of this study is to investigate the impact of the direct marketing tools on customer awareness and business performance. This is because, there is a lack of enough research on the impact of promotional tools mainly the direct marketing ones in creating awareness and growth of the business. The specific objectives of this study are to find out the direct marketing tools used by Konka Group Company Ltd. towards its customers’ awareness and business performance, to evaluate the impact of direct marketing tools used by Konka Group Company Ltd. on its customers’ awareness and business performance and to assess the challenges encountered by Konka Group Company Ltd. in its direct marketing activities. The findings are expected to play an important role on different parties including researchers in acquiring practical skills out of the theory learnt at school, to Konka Group Company Ltd. in exploring how customers appreciate their promotional tools and knowing the gaps which needs to be addressed. It is expected to help future researchers who want to carry out the study in the similar field. The study relies on existing literature in the area of marketing mainly in relationship marketing. The study was conducted at the shops of Konka Group Company Ltd. within Kigali City centre. The research design was descriptive in nature. The study was a census survey and 60 respondents participated in this research. Data were collected using the questionnaire and interview schedules. Data from 60 respondents were analysed using descriptive statistics, presented in tables with percentage and frequency and processed with the help of Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). The findings show that the direct response marketing is the mostly used tool by Konka Group Company Ltd., as shown by 98.3% of the respondents. The findings also indicate that the direct marketing tools used by Konka Group Company Ltd. improve its customers awareness and business performance through encouraging the repeated purchases and enhancing the sales volume as revealed by 63.3% and 71.7% of the respondents respectively. However, the company faces the problems including the lack of proper follow up of e-mails sent to the customers, lack of attention of customers on the short messages received from Konka Group Company Ltd. and stiff competition. It is recommended to the management of Konka Group Company Ltd. to make a proper follow up on messages sent to customers and to devise the different competitive strategies. The customers are advised not to ignore all short messages addressed to them before reading as they may be beneficial.JEL: M10; M31; M37  Article visualizations: