The Marketing Mix

Monday, September 6th, 2010 | local info

Nearly every company on the planet sets out with the main objective of making money. This is generally done by producing some form of product, or offering a service, and then charging people money for it.

First of all, 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 item and you will both be trying to make money from the same shoppers, who only want to spend their money once. So how can you improve the chances of them spending money with you?

Marketing is the main tool used by modern businesses to draw potential customers to do business with them and not with their competitors. It is a very extensive topic that is influenced by a great number of internal and external factors, but when done right it can be the one business practise that could make or break a corporation.

So where should you start when constructing a marketing strategy for your own business? Well, each situation is different, and every business will have its own set of strengths and flaws that must be taken into consideration, but there is a marketing rule that can be applied to almost any corporation to be used as a marketing platform.

The Marketing Mix

The marketing mix was a phrase that was first coined during the 1950’s and is a phrase that is used to express the fundamental building blocks of any marketing system. It reflects the fact that marketing is not a simple, blunt-edged business tool, but rather a subtle balance of different elements of business functions.

The term was later developed to include the idea of “four P’s” that described the critical elements of the marketing mix. The formalisation of these P’s made it very easy for business managers and marketers to quickly associate the elements of marketing to the strengths of their own organisations, and by doing so could very quickly create a personalised and effective marketing strategy.

There are multiple sales avenues available to floor prep and coatings and our own business used marketing ideas to open new routes to our customers.

Product

Whilst every element of the marketing mix is a necessity, the “product” element mentioned as one of the four P’s is perhaps the most critical of all. It identifies the physical product or intangible service that your company will be offering, and at the end of the day it is the reason that buyers are going to spend money with you.

Several people don’t think that marketing has any role to play when it comes to the actual product that your company is selling. In fact, the common train of thought very often bears the precise opposite sentiment. Surely it should be the other way around - your manufacturing department creates an item for sale and then it is the task of the marketing department to find ways to sell it, right? This is not necessarily the case.

Consider the computer software market as an example. There are many established brands of both operating system and software application solutions on the marketplace already, and since the market is relatively well saturated it would be incredibly tough (and expensive) to “take on the big boys”.

Rather than creating an operating system and then trying to craft a marketing strategy to rival the likes of Microsoft or Apple, it would be more effective to look at what sorts of product are sought after in the current marketplace, and how feasible it would be to manufacture and sell them. By being mindful of the marketing mix early on in your product development cycle you can avoid business dead-ends at a later stage.

Once your goods have been designed and created it is still a vital skill to be able to objectively evaluate your own products to identify the reasons that a customer should buy your product rather than a competitors’.

A different form of this part of the marketing mix is known as product variation and is typically used to either prolong the lifecycle of a product already in the market, or to make your new product attractive to as many consumers as possible.

The car industry uses this technique very effectively by offering various engines, trim packages and interior options with the cars that they sell. They use the marketing mix to great effect to sell their own products in an extremely competitive marketplace. Whilst these companies may have huge marketing budgets, the same concepts can be applied to all companies.

To maintain a standard corporate image a company ought to redesign their web presence an example we found was gas electricity price comparison which reflect colourings, text and images associated with their own branding.

Price

Another key factor in the marketing mix relates to the price of your products or services. This isn’t a simple case of performing market research to figure out the highest price that your customers would spend (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 targets your business has.

Whilst it may seem obvious, it is still worth noting that price has always been, and probably always will be, one of the key factors that shoppers take into account when they are making a purchase. It is also worth noting that customers do not always consider the lowest price to be the best value. Actually a price that is too low can often turn customers away.

There are many questions that you need to ask yourself when devising a good pricing strategy, key among which are the price sensitivity of your clients, what your competitors are doing and how can pricing boost your own profits. From a strategy point of view though, pricing can be covered by two primary principals; price skimming and penetration pricing. These are outlined below.

Price skimming

The principal idea behind price skimming is to make as much money as possible from the segment of the market which is price-insensitive and will be prepared to spend a large amount of money to receive a product or service early on.

This pricing technique is frequently used in the consumer electronics market where customers will often eagerly await the launch of a new mobile phone or computer games console. Makers could set almost any price they wanted to and there would still be a loyal base of customers that would pay it. By making use of this method as part of a pre-ordering strategy, a firm can help to smooth its own money flow.

Penetration pricing

Penetration pricing is at the opposite end of the pricing spectrum, and is geared towards gaining a large market share at a short-term cost so that monetary rewards can be earned long into the future. It can be a high risk strategy, but when employed correctly it can create revenue streams for many years to come. When establishing a price for penetration it is still essential to not give a poor impression of your product by aiming for too low a figure.

Another thing to bear in mind is that “price” is the one part of the marketing mix that will generate income for a business. The other members of the four P’s will all cost money to create or undertake. So it is even more vital to get your pricing strategy right.

To optimise our web site for Google visibility we selected large childrens bean bags as a targeted phrase since it relates to our company and what we offer.

Place

Place is the portion of the marketing mix that’s often not addressed by companies, but it’s still an important part of selling your product effectively. In short, it describes the method in which you provide your product to your consumer, and subsequently how you receive money from them.

The most common ramifications of place-based marketing are the physical venues in which your products are sold. For the vast majority of consumer products, this involves the distribution network between your manufacturing centres and shops or other outlets around the country. Since distribution of a physical product costs money it is important to determine your own priorities and alter your distribution network accordingly.

With the increasing use of the Internet by your potential customers, marketing strategies have had to consider how they use the Internet to help distribute their products. By using the Internet as a place of contact (or even as a whole distribution channel in download-based markets such as MP3s) firms are now able to reach out to a huge pool of possible customers. Effective positioning of your product or service can therefore yield impressive economic results.

Promotion

When you mention the word “marketing”, most people immediately think of the promotional aspect of the marketing mix, although as we have seen, this is merely one branch of a more complete system. Promotion can be used on a very individual basis or as a mass communication instrument, and whilst it might be an expensive undertaking it is often an important one. The key concern of promotion is to deliver a specific message that will increase sales.

Advertising is one of the most common forms of promotion. Classically it would be done by posting on billboards, producing short clips for TV and radio or by physically handing out flyers or leaflets to potential customers. With the coming of the information age we have seen a great increase in promotion via e-mail and the Internet, or just as targeted advertising materials posted through your front door. The potential for individualised advertising has never been so great.

Another important part of promotion involves branding, which will not necessarily yield more sales directly, but goes back to one of the preliminary purposes of marketing; getting customers to pick your product over those of your competitors.

Putting it into Practise

As previously mentioned each business is unique 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 strategy.

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