Practically every company on the planet sets out with the primary objective of making money. This is usually done by producing some form of product, or offering a service, and then charging customers money for it.

Firstly, it is a very rare case that 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 competing 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 money once.

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 broad topic that is affected by a great number of internal and external variables, but when done right it can be the one business practice that could make or break a company. Any time spent on marketing will reap rewards, although spending this time correctly can yield incredible outcomes.

So where should you begin when constructing a marketing strategy for your own company? Well, every situation is different, and each 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 framework. It is called the “Marketing Mix”.

The Marketing Mix

The marketing mix was a phrase that was first coined in the 1950′s and is a phrase that is used to express the fundamental building blocks of any marketing system. It demonstrates the fact that marketing is not a straightforward, blunt-edged business technique, but rather a delicate balance of different elements of business functions.

The term was later built upon to include the concept of “four P’s” that described the essential 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 quickly create a personalised and effective marketing plan.

Marketing is a global business idea and may get carried out on company products or 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 business will be selling, and at the end of the day it is the reason that customers are going to spend money with you.

Several people don’t think that marketing has any role 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 a product for sale and then it is the task of the marketing department to find ways to sell it, right?

Consider the computer software market as an example. There are many established brands of both operating system as well as software application solutions on the marketplace already, and because the market is fairly well saturated it would be very tough (and expensive) to “take on the big boys”. So how could the principles of the marketing mix help in this situation?

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 feasible it would be to produce 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 time.

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 should 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 called product variation and is generally 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. Again, this method 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.

To preserve a standard corporate image a business ought to update their site an example we found was gas electricity price comparison who echo colours, fonts and graphics associated with their branding.

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 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 specific targets your business 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 key factors that customers take into account when they are making a purchase. It is also worth noting that customers do not constantly consider the lowest price to be the best price. Actually a price that is too low can often 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 maximise 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 principal idea driving price skimming is to make as much cash as possible from the sector of the market which is price-insensitive and will be willing to spend a large amount of money to receive a product or service early on. Not only can this technique yield great financial benefits, but it can also advertise an exclusive and high quality image of your item.

This pricing technique is very often used in the consumer electronics market where customers will often eagerly await the release 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 core 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 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 monetary rewards can be made 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 establishing a price for penetration it is still essential to not give a bad impression of your product by aiming for too low a figure.

Another thing to keep in mind is that “price” is the one part of the marketing mix that will generate earnings for a business. The other members of the four P’s will all cost money to create or undertake.

Following using on-line tools to compare key phrase search frequency we chose chicken cooking to guide our strategy for on-line promotion as well as off-line advertising materials.

Place

Place is the portion of the marketing mix that is often disregarded by companies, but it’s still an important part of selling your product successfully. In a nutshell, it describes the method in which you deliver your product to your customer, and consequently how you collect money from them. It can be a great marketing technique when used appropriately.

The most typical 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 manufacturing centres and shops and other outlets around the world. Since distribution of a physical product costs money it is crucial to determine your own priorities and alter your distribution network appropriately.

With the increasing use of the Internet by your prospective customers, marketing techniques have had to take into account how they use the Internet to help distribute their products. By using the Internet as a place of contact (or even as a complete distribution channel in download-based markets such as MP3s) companies are now able to reach out to a huge pool of potential customers. Effective placing of your product or service can therefore deliver 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 only 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 a costly undertaking it is often an important one. The key concern of promotion is to deliver a specific message that will improve sales.

Advertising is one of the most typical forms of promotion. Classically 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 buyers. 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 door.

Another significant part of promotion involves branding, which will not necessarily yield more product sales directly, but goes back to one of the preliminary purposes of marketing; getting customers to choose your product over those of your rivals. When all other parts of the marketing mix are equal it could be branding that swings a customer’s choice.

Putting it into Practice

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