Personal selling provides an opportunity for customizing
the message for an individual customer, and as mentioned above,
the opportunity to adapt the message during the customer–salesperson
interaction. Because of this, attention to, and involvement with, the message
is likely to be high. Personal selling also offers a chance to demonstrate
product benefits that might be difficult or even impossible to
effectively convey with other forms of marketing communication.
The key advantage of personal selling in marketing communication
unfortunately leads to its primary disadvantage, especially for IMC.
Because of the flexibility and multiple delivery sources (the different
salespeople) it is difficult to maintain message consistency. And given the
nature of personal selling, relative to other ways of delivering a message,
it is expensive and has a low reach. These advantages and disadvantages
associated with personal selling in IMC are summarized in Figure 6.4