titleThe Marketing Mix/titlecategory3/category

Almost 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 where a company can offer a product or service that is genuinely unique and cannot be provided by anybody 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 customers, who only want to spend their cash once.

Marketing is the main tool used by modern businesses to draw potential customers to do business with them and not with their rivals. It is a very broad topic that is affected by a great number of internal and external variables, but when done right it can be the single business practice that can make or break a corporation.

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

strongThe Marketing Mix/strong

The marketing mix was a phrase that was first coined during the 1950′s and is an expression that is used to express the fundamental building blocks of any marketing strategy. It demonstrates the fact that marketing is not a simple, blunt-edged business technique, but rather a subtle balance of different elements of business operations.

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 clear for company managers and marketers to quickly relate the elements of marketing to the strengths of their own companies, and by doing so could very rapidly form a personalised and efficient marketing system.

Marketing is a global business idea which may get adapted for a title=floor maintenance href=http://www.surfacequest.co.uk/gallery.htmfloor maintenance/a as well as any amount of different products and services.

strongProduct/strong

Whilst every aspect of the marketing mix is a necessity, the product element mentioned as one of the four P’s is perhaps the most crucial of all. It identifies the physical product or intangible service that your business will be selling, 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 typical 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 job of the marketing department to find ways to sell it, right?

Take the computer software market as an example. There are many well-known brands of both operating system and software application solutions in the marketplace already, and because the market is fairly well saturated it would be very 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 far more effective to look at what types of product are sought after in the current marketplace, and how viable it would be to manufacture and sell them. By being aware of the marketing mix early on in your product development cycle you can prevent business dead-ends at a later time.

Once your products 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 technique is called product differentiation and forms 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 extend 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 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 sell. They use the marketing mix to good effect to sell their own goods in an extremely competitive marketplace. Whilst these companies may have huge marketing budgets, the same principles can be applied to all companies.

An example of one of the most recent forms of promotional advertising is our own a title=fish cooking href=http://fishcooking.net/fish cooking/a website which offers versatile and accessible means to reach potential customers.

strongPrice/strong

Another important 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 highest price that your customers would spend (although that can be a handy tool to use), but rather using the price of your products as a strategic tool designed to achieve any particular goals your company has.

Although it may seem obvious, it’s still worth pointing out 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 value.

There are many questions that you need to ask yourself when devising a good pricing strategy, key amongst which are the price sensitivity of your customers, 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.

strongPrice skimming/strong

The main 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. Not only can this technique yield excellent economic benefits, but it can also advertise an exclusive and high quality image of your item.

This pricing strategy is frequently used in the consumer electronics industry 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 core of customers that would pay it.

strongPenetration pricing/strong

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 rewards can be made long into the future. It can be a risky strategy, but when employed correctly it can create revenue streams for many years to come. When establishing a price for penetration it is still critical to not give a bad impression of your product by aiming for too low a number.

Another thing to keep 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.

Grabbing some of the on-line search market is extremely beneficial, so pick any phrase, like a title=become a doctor href=http://becomeadoctor.org/become a doctor/a then consider if that phrase has an ample search market for your purposes.

strongPlace/strong

Place is the part of the marketing mix that is 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 deliver 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 products are sold. For the majority of consumer products, this involves the distribution network between your production centres and shops and other outlets around the country. Since distribution of a physical product costs money it is crucial to identify 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 point of contact (or even as an entire distribution channel in download-based markets such as MP3s) firms are now able to reach out to a huge pool of potential customers. Effective placing of your product or service can therefore yield impressive economic results.

strongPromotion/strong

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 comprehensive system. Promotion can be employed on a very individual basis or as a mass communication instrument, and whilst it can be a costly 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 handing out flyers or leaflets to potential buyers. With the coming of the information age we have witnessed 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 good.

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.

strongPutting it into Practice/strong

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