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Practically every business 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 customers money for it. This fundamental principle is fairly straight-forward, although it contains many intricate details.

Firstly, it is a very rare case where a company can offer a product or service that is truly unique and cannot be supplied 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 earn money from the same shoppers, who only want to spend their cash once. So how can you improve the chances of them spending money with you?

Marketing is the primary tool used by modern firms 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 deal of internal and external factors, but when done well it can be the one business practice that can make or break a company. Any time spent on marketing will reap rewards, although spending this time correctly can yield extraordinary results.

So where should you start when creating a marketing strategy for your own business? Well, each situation is different, and every industry will have its own set of advantages and weak points 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 framework. It is called the “Marketing Mix”.

The Marketing Mix

The marketing mix was a phrase that was first coined during the 1950′s and is an expression that is used to describe the fundamental building blocks of any marketing strategy. It demonstrates the fact that marketing is not a straightforward, blunt-edged business tool, but rather a delicate balance of different aspects of business operations. It got its name since it is similar to the ingredients checklist for a recipe.

The term was later built upon 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 clear for company managers and marketers to swiftly associate the elements of marketing to the strengths of their own companies, and by doing so could very quickly create a tailored and effective marketing system. The four P’s are Product, Price, Place and Promotion.

Marketing is a worldwide business concept which can get applied to conferences or almost any number of other products and services.

Product

Whilst every aspect 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 company will be offering, and at the end of the day it is the reason that customers are going to spend money with you.

Several 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 common train of thought very often bears the exact opposite sentiment. Surely it should be the opposite way around – your production department creates a product for sale and then it is the job of the marketing department to discover 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 since the market is relatively well saturated it would be incredibly 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 attempting 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 produce and sell them.

Once your products have been designed and created it is still a critical skill to be able to objectively evaluate your own products to identify the reasons why 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 pie.

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

The motor industry uses this approach very effectively by offering different engines, trim packages and interior options with the cars that they sell. They use the marketing mix to great effect to sell their own goods in an extremely competitive marketplace.

As part of our own marketing plan, our business carefully studied what made our products stand out from the crowd.

One of the newest forms of promotional marketing is through websites which offer versatile and accessible means to target potential consumersOur website is at www.rostrum.eu .

Price

Another key factor in the marketing mix relates to the price of your products or services. This is not a simple case of carrying out market research to figure out the top 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 particular objectives your business has. The potential advantages of an effective pricing strategy are surprisingly large!

Whilst it may seem obvious, it is still worth pointing out that price has always been, and likely 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 don’t always consider the lowest 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 when devising a good pricing plan, key amongst which are the price sensitivity of your customers, what your rivals are doing and how can pricing boost your own profits. From a strategy point of view however, pricing can be covered by two main principals; price skimming and penetration pricing.

Price skimming

The main 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 premium amount of money to receive a product or service early on. Not only can this technique yield great economic benefits, but it can also promote an exclusive and high quality image of your product.

This pricing technique is very often used in the consumer electronics industry where customers will often eagerly await the launch 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 core of customers that would pay it. By making use of this method as part of a pre-ordering strategy, a company can help to smooth its own cash 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 financial benefits can be earned long into the future. It can be a high risk strategy, but when used correctly it can create revenue streams for many years to come. When setting a price for penetration it is still important to not give a bad impression of your product by aiming for too low a figure.

Yet another thing to keep in mind is that “price” is the only 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 produce or carry out.

“Product is paramount” is one of the main slogans applied within our mens shooting socks organisation which aims to emphasise to all employees that we expect high quality manufacturing.

Place

Place is the portion of the marketing mix that’s often overlooked by companies, but it is still a significant part of selling your product successfully. In short, it describes the way in which you provide your product to your consumer, and subsequently how you collect money from them. It can be a fantastic marketing technique when applied appropriately.

The most common ramifications of place-based marketing are the physical venues in which your goods are sold. For the vast majority of consumer products, this includes the distribution infrastructure between your production 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 adjust your distribution network accordingly.

With the increasing use of the Internet by your potential customers, marketing techniques have had to take into account how they use the Internet to help deliver their products. By using the Internet as a place of contact (or even as a complete distribution route in download-based markets such as MP3s) firms are now able to reach out to a huge pool of potential customers.

Promotion

When you say the word “marketing”, most people instantly 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 employed on a very individual basis or as a mass communication tool, and whilst it can be a costly undertaking it is often an important one. The primary concern of promotion is to deliver a particular message that will boost sales.

Advertising is one of the most typical forms of promotion. Typically it would be done by posting on billboards, creating 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 witnessed a great increase in promotion via e-mail and the Internet, or simply as targeted advertising materials posted through your front door.

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

Putting it into Practice

As previously mentioned every business is unique and will have different marketing requirements. By using a mixture of the four P’s reviewed above you can take a good view of your own marketing plan.

Filed under: General Interest