The Marketing Mix
Practically every company on the planet sets out with the main objective of earning money. This is usually done by producing some form of product, or offering a service, and then charging people money for it.
Firstly, it is a very rare case where a company can offer a product or service that is truly unique and cannot be provided by anybody 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.
Marketing is the primary tool used by modern organisations to draw potential customers to do business with them and not with their rivals. It is a very extensive topic that is affected by a great number of internal and external variables, but when done well it can be the single business practise that could make or break a company.
So where should you begin when constructing a marketing strategy for your own company? Well, each situation is different, and every industry will have its own set of advantages and weaknesses that must be taken into consideration, but there is a marketing rule that can be applied to almost any company to be used as a marketing framework.
The Marketing Mix
The marketing mix was a term that was first coined in the 1950′s and is a phrase that is used to describe 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 delicate balance of different aspects of business operations.
The term was later built upon to include the idea of “four P’s” that described the essential elements of the marketing mix. The formalisation of these P’s made it very clear for company managers and marketers to quickly relate the elements of marketing to the strengths of their own organisations, and by doing so could very rapidly form a personalised and effective marketing plan.
Our company has risen to become a forerunner in back pain treatment Ruddington after using customised marketing and advertising ideas across our complete range of offerings.
Product
Whilst every element of the marketing mix is a necessity, the “product” element mentioned as one of the four P’s is possibly 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 customers are going to spend money with you.
Many people do not think that marketing has any role to play when it comes to the physical product that your company is selling. In fact, the typical train of thought very often bears the exact opposite sentiment. Surely it should be the other way around – your manufacturing department creates a product for sale and then it is the job of the marketing department to discover ways to sell it, right? This is not always the case.
Take 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 fairly well saturated it would be incredibly tough (and expensive) to “take on the big boys”.
Rather than developing an operating system and then attempting to craft a marketing strategy to rival the likes of Microsoft and 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 produce and sell them.
Once your goods have been fashioned and created it is still a vital skill to be able to objectively review your own products to identify the reasons that a customer would buy your product rather than a competitors’. The skill is called product differentiation and is one of the basic skills of the product part of the marketing mix cake.
Another form of this part of the marketing mix is known as product variation and is typically 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. Once again, this technique can be applied at all stages of product development.
The car industry uses this technique 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.
An example of one of the most recent forms of promotional advertising is our own cages parrot site which provides flexible and accessible means to target potential consumers.
Price
Another important factor in the marketing mix concerns the price of your products or services. This isn’t a simple case of carrying out 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 tool designed to achieve any specific targets your company has. The potential advantages of an effective pricing strategy are surprisingly large!
Although it may seem obvious, it is still worth noting that price has always been, and probably always will be, one of the crucial factors that customers 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 price. Actually a price that is too low can sometimes turn buyers away.
There are many questions that you need to ask yourself while devising a good pricing plan, key amongst 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 main principals; price skimming and penetration pricing.
Price skimming
The principal idea behind price skimming is to make as much cash as possible from the sector of the market which is price-insensitive and will be prepared to spend a large amount of money to get a product or service early on.
This pricing technique is very often used in the consumer electronics market where customers will often eagerly await the launch of a new mobile phone or computer games console. Manufacturers could set almost 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 geared towards gaining a large market share at a short-term cost so that financial benefits can be made long into the future. It can be a risky strategy, but when used correctly it can create revenue streams for many years to come. When establishing a price for penetration it is still important to not give a poor impression of your product by aiming for too low a figure.
Yet another thing to bear in mind is that “price” is the one part of the marketing mix that will generate revenue for a business. The other members of the four P’s will all cost money to create or carry out. So it is even more vital to get your pricing technique right.
We were able to make use of our previous market research about lamb cooking to kick off all online keyword optimisation we were undertaking.
Place
Place is the portion of the marketing mix that’s often disregarded by companies, but it’s still a significant part of selling your product successfully. In a nutshell, it describes the way in which you deliver your product to your customer, and subsequently how you receive money from them. It can be a fantastic marketing approach when used appropriately.
The most typical implications of place-based marketing are the physical venues in which your products are sold. For the vast majority of consumer products, this includes the distribution infrastructure between your manufacturing centres and retailers or other outlets around the country. Since distribution of a physical product costs money it is crucial to determine your own priorities and alter your distribution network appropriately. 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 distribute their products. By using the Internet as a place of contact (or even as an entire distribution channel in download-based markets such as MP3s) companies are now able to reach out to a large pool of potential customers. Effective placing of your product or service can therefore yield impressive financial results.
Promotion
When you mention the word “marketing”, many people instantly 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 instrument, and whilst it might be an expensive undertaking it is often an important one.
Advertising is one of the most typical forms of promotion. Typically 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 witnessed a great increase in promotion via e-mail and the Internet, or simply as targeted advertising materials posted through your front door.
Another significant part of promotion involves branding, which will not necessarily yield more sales directly, but relates back to one of the preliminary purposes of marketing; getting customers to pick your product over those of your rivals.
Putting it into Practise
As previously mentioned every company is unique and will have different marketing requirements. By using a mixture of the four P’s reviewed above you can take an effective view of your own marketing plan.