Nearly every company on the planet sets out with the main objective of earning money. This is usually done by manufacturing 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 specific details.
First of all, it is a very rare case where a business can offer a product or service that is truly unique and cannot be supplied by anyone else. This means that your enterprise will be competing with other businesses that sell a similar item and you will both be trying to earn money from the same customers, who only want to spend their cash once.
Marketing is the primary tool used by modern firms to draw prospective customers to do business with them and not with their competitors. 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 corporation.
So where should you begin when constructing a marketing strategy for your own business? Well, every situation is different, and every industry will have its own set of strengths 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 known as the “Marketing Mix”.
The Marketing Mix
The marketing mix was a term that was first coined during the 1950′s and is a phrase 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 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 company managers and marketers to swiftly relate the elements of marketing to the strengths of their own companies, and by doing so could very rapidly form a tailored and effective marketing system. The four P’s are; Product, Price, Place and Promotion.
Marketing is a worldwide business concept and could be carried out on custom printed flags as well as any amount of different products and services.
Product
Whilst every element of the marketing mix is a requirement, 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 business will be selling, and at the end of the day it is the reason that customers are going to spend money with you. If this element is not correctly managed then your organisation will find it hard to survive.
Several people don’t think that marketing has any place 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 exact 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.
Take the computer software market as an example. There are many established brands of both operating system as well as software application products in the marketplace already, and because the market is relatively well saturated it would be very tough (and expensive) to “take on the big boys”. So how can 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 and Apple, it would be more effective to look at what sorts of product are desired in the current marketplace, and how viable it would be to produce and sell them.
Once your goods 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 should buy your product rather than a competitors’. The technique is called product differentiation and forms 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 called product variation and is typically used to either lengthen the lifecycle of a product already in the market, or to make your new product attractive to as many customers as possible.
The car industry uses this technique very effectively by offering various engines, trim packages and interior options with the cars that they offer. They use the marketing mix to great effect to sell their own goods in an extremely competitive marketplace.
We do not have a specific biodegradable flag marketing division within our company although many of our own managers have been able to adopt marketing as part of their work role.
Price
Another important factor in the marketing mix relates to the price of your products or services. This isn’t a simple case of carrying out market research to determine the top price that your customers would pay (although that can be a handy tool to use), but rather making use of the price of your products as a strategic tool designed to achieve any particular targets your company has. The potential advantages of an effective pricing strategy are surprisingly substantial!
Whilst 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 don’t always consider the cheapest price to be the best price.
There are many questions that you need to ask yourself while devising a good pricing strategy, key amongst which are the price sensitivity of your customers, what your competitors 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 penetration pricing. These are outlined below.
Price skimming
The principal idea driving price skimming is to make as much cash as possible from the segment 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. Not only can this approach yield great economic advantages, but it can also promote 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 release of a new mobile phone or computer games console. Manufacturers could set nearly any price they wanted to and there would still be a loyal core of customers that would pay it. By using 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 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 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.
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 produce or undertake.
Before our corporation began looking into online promoting hand waving flags didn’t seem to be an clear choice of key phrase to use as our primary focus.
Place
Place is the portion of the marketing mix that’s often disregarded by companies, but it’s still an important 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. It can be a fantastic marketing technique when applied appropriately.
The most typical ramifications of place-based marketing are the physical venues in which your goods are sold. For the majority of consumer products, this involves the distribution network between your production centres and shops and other outlets around the world. Since distribution of a physical product costs money it is important to determine your own priorities and alter your distribution network appropriately. This is the main use of this element of the marketing mix.
With the increasing use of the Internet by your prospective customers, marketing strategies have had to consider how they use the Internet to help distribute their products. By using the Internet as a point of contact (or even as a whole distribution route in download-based markets such as MP3s) firms are now able to reach out to a large pool of potential customers.
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 merely one branch of a more complete system. Promotion can be employed on a very individual basis or as a mass communication instrument, and whilst it may be an expensive undertaking it is often an essential one.
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 distributing 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 door. The potential for individualised advertising has never been so great.
Another important part of promotion involves branding, which may not necessarily yield more sales directly, but goes back to one of the initial purposes of marketing; getting customers to choose your product over those of your competitors. When all other pieces of the marketing mix are equal it could be branding that swings a customer’s decision.
Putting it into Practice
As previously mentioned each business is unique and will have different marketing requirements. By using a mixture of the four P’s discussed above you can take an effective view of your own marketing strategy.