Practically every business on the planet sets out with the primary objective of making money. This is generally done by manufacturing some form of product, or offering a service, and then charging people money for it. This fundamental theory is fairly straight-forward, though it contains many specific details.
Firstly, it is a very rare case that a company can offer a product or service that is truly unique and cannot be provided by anyone else. This means that your enterprise will be contesting with other businesses that sell a similar product and you will both be trying to earn money from the same shoppers, who only want to spend their money once. So how can you increase the chances of them spending money with you?
Marketing is the main tool used by modern businesses to draw prospective customers to do business with them and not with their rivals. It is a very broad topic that is influenced by a great number of internal and external factors, but when done well it can be the one business practise that can make or break a corporation.
So where should you begin when constructing a marketing strategy for your own company? Well, every situation is different, and every company will have its own set of advantages and weak points that must be taken into consideration, but there is a marketing principle that can be applied to almost any corporation to be used as a marketing framework. It is known as the “Marketing Mix”.
The Marketing Mix
The marketing mix was a phrase that was first coined in the 1950’s and is an expression that is used to express the fundamental building blocks of any marketing strategy. It reflects the fact that marketing is not a simple, blunt-edged business technique, but rather a delicate balance of different elements of business functions. It got its name because it is similar to the ingredients list for a recipe.
The term was later developed to include the concept of “four P’s” that described the critical elements of the marketing mix. The formalisation of these P’s made it very clear for business managers and marketers to swiftly relate the elements of marketing to the strengths of their own companies, and by doing so could very quickly form a personalised and efficient marketing strategy. The four P’s are Product, Price, Place and Promotion.
Nearly every segment in the modern marketplace is competitive, particularly back treatment Ruddington, in which good marketing decisions could mean the success or failing of the business.
Product
Although every element of the marketing mix is a requirement, the “product” element mentioned as one of the four P’s is possibly the most critical of all. It describes the physical product or intangible service that your business will be offering, and at the end of the day it is the reason that buyers are going to spend money with you. If this element is not correctly managed then your organisation will find it hard to survive.
Many people don’t think that marketing has any role to play when it comes to the physical product that your business is selling. In fact, the typical train of thought very often bears the precise opposite sentiment. Surely it should be the other way around - your production department creates a product for sale and then it is the task of the marketing department to find ways to sell it, right?
Take the computer software market as an example. There are many established brands of both operating system and software application products in the market already, and because the market is fairly well saturated it would be very tough (and expensive) to “take on the big boys”. So how could the principles of the marketing mix help in this circumstance?
Rather than creating an operating system and then trying to craft a marketing strategy to take on the likes of Microsoft or Apple, it would be more effective to look at what types of product are desired in the current marketplace, and how viable it would be to manufacture and sell them.
Once your products have been designed and created it is still a critical skill to be able to objectively review your own products to recognise the reasons that a customer would buy your product rather than a competitors’. The technique is called product differentiation and is one of the fundamental skills of the product part of the marketing mix pie.
A different form of this part of the marketing mix is known as product variation and is generally used to either lengthen the lifecycle of a product currently in the market, or to make your brand new product attractive to as many consumers as possible. Again, this method can be applied at all stages of product development.
The car industry uses this approach very effectively by offering different engines, trim packages and interior options with the cars that they offer. They use the marketing mix to good effect to sell their own products in an extremely competitive marketplace.
As part of our individual marketing strategy, our AA battery business very carefully studied what exactly made our goods stand out from the crowd.
Price
Another important factor in the marketing mix concerns the price of your products or services. This is not a simple case of performing market research to determine the highest price that your customers would pay (although that can be a useful tool to use), but rather using the price of your products as a strategic weapon designed to achieve any specific objectives your company has.
Although it may seem obvious, it’s still worth noting that price has always been, and probably always will be, one of the crucial factors that shoppers take into account when they are making a purchase. It is also worth noting that customers do not constantly consider the cheapest price to be the best value. Actually a price that is too low can often turn buyers away.
There are many questions that you need to ask yourself when devising a good pricing plan, key amongst which are the price sensitivity of your clients, what your rivals are doing and how can pricing maximise your own profits. From a strategy point of view though, pricing can be covered by two primary principals; price skimming and also penetration pricing.
Price skimming
The main idea driving price skimming is to make as much money as possible from the sector of the market which is price-insensitive and will be prepared to spend a premium amount of money to get a product or service early on.
This pricing technique is very often used in the consumer electronics industry where customers will often eagerly await the release of a new mobile phone or computer games console. Makers could set nearly any price they wanted to and there would still be a loyal base of customers that would pay it.
Penetration pricing
Penetration pricing is at the other end of the pricing spectrum, and is tailored towards gaining a large market share at a short-term cost so that monetary benefits can be earned long into the future. It can be a risky strategy, but when employed correctly it can setup revenue streams for many years to come.
Another thing to keep in mind is that “price” is the one part of the marketing mix that will generate earnings for a business. The other members of the four P’s will all cost money to create or carry out.
We were able to use our previous marketplace research regarding stop diarrhea to start all on-line key word optimisation we were undertaking.
Place
Place is the portion of the marketing mix that is often not addressed by companies, but it’s still a significant part of selling your product effectively. In short, it describes the way in which you provide your product to your consumer, and subsequently how you receive money from them.
The most common implications of place-based marketing are the physical locations in which your goods are sold. For the vast majority of consumer products, this involves the distribution infrastructure between your manufacturing plants and shops and other outlets around the world. Since distribution of a physical product costs money it is important to identify your own priorities and adapt your distribution network accordingly. This is the principal use of this element of the marketing mix.
With the growing use of the Internet by your prospective customers, marketing techniques have had to consider how they use the Internet to help deliver their products. By using the Internet as a point of contact (or even as a complete distribution channel in download-based markets such as MP3s) companies are now able to reach out to a huge pool of potential customers. Effective positioning of your product or service can therefore yield impressive financial results.
Promotion
When you mention the word “marketing”, many people immediately think of the promotional side of the marketing mix, although as we have seen, this is only one branch of a more complete system. Promotion can be used on a very individual basis or as a mass communication tool, and whilst it can be an expensive undertaking it is often an important one.
Advertising is one of the most typical forms of promotion. Classically it would be done by posting on billboards, producing short clips for TV and radio or by physically distributing flyers or leaflets to potential buyers. With the arrival of the information age we have seen a great increase in promotion via e-mail and the Internet, or just as targeted advertising material posted through your front door.
Another significant part of promotion involves branding, which will not necessarily yield more product sales directly, but relates back to one of the initial functions of marketing; getting customers to pick your product over those of your rivals. When all other parts of the marketing mix are equal it could be branding that sways a customer’s decision.
Putting it into Practise
As previously mentioned every business is different and will have different marketing needs. By using a balance of the four P’s reviewed above you can take an effective view of your own marketing plan.
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