Nearly every business on the planet sets out with the primary objective of making money. This is usually done by manufacturing 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 genuinely unique and cannot be provided by anybody else. This means that your business 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 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 number of internal and external variables, but when done right it can be the one business practise that could make or break a company. Any time spent on marketing will reap benefits, although spending this time efficiently can yield extraordinary results.

So where should you start when creating a marketing strategy for your own business? Well, each situation is different, and each company will have its own set of advantages and weaknesses 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. It is known as the “Marketing Mix”.

The Marketing Mix

The marketing mix was a phrase that was first coined during the 1950’s and is a phrase that is used to describe 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 delicate balance of different elements 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 business managers and marketers to swiftly associate the elements of marketing to the strengths of their own companies, and by doing so could very rapidly form a tailored and efficient marketing strategy.

The “product” aspect of the four P’s can pertain to a service, like painting concrete floors, or any kind of intangible asset being provided for sale by a company.

Product

Although every element of the marketing mix is a necessity, the “product” element mentioned as one of the four P’s is possibly the most crucial of all. It describes the physical product or intangible service that your company 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 part is not adequately managed then your organisation will find it hard to survive.

Many people don’t think that marketing has any place 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 exact opposite sentiment. Surely it should be the other way around – your production 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 well-known 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”. So how can the principles of the marketing mix assist in this circumstance?

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 manufacture and sell them.

Once your products have been fashioned and created it is still a vital 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 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 lengthen the lifecycle of a product currently in the market, or to make your brand new product attractive to as many customers as possible.

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

An example of one of the most recent forms of promotional marketing is our own Maytag side by side refrigerators website which offers flexible and accessible means to target potential customers.

Price

Another important factor in the marketing mix concerns 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 handy tool to use), but rather using the price of your products as a strategic tool designed to achieve any specific objectives your company has. The potential benefits of an effective pricing plan are surprisingly large!

Whilst 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 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 value.

There are many questions that you need to ask yourself while devising a good pricing strategy, key among 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 main principals; price skimming and also 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 prepared to spend a large amount of money to receive a product or service early on.

This pricing strategy is frequently 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 nearly any price they wanted to and there would still be a loyal base 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 money 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 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 number.

Another thing to bear in mind is that “price” is the only 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 carry out.

To optimise our website for search engine visibility we selected buy childrens bean bags for a targeted phrase since it relates to our business and what we offer.

Place

Place is the portion of the marketing mix that is often not addressed by companies, but it is still an important part of selling your product successfully. In short, it describes the method in which you provide your product to your customer, and subsequently how you receive money from them.

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 involves the distribution infrastructure between your production centres and retailers or other outlets around the world. Since distribution of a physical product costs money it is important to identify your own priorities and modify your distribution network appropriately. This is the principal application of this part of the marketing mix.

With the growing use of the Internet by your potential customers, marketing strategies 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 an entire distribution route in download-based markets such as MP3s) firms are now able to reach out to a huge pool of possible customers. Effective positioning of your product or service can therefore deliver impressive financial results.

Promotion

When you mention the word “marketing”, many people immediately 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 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 increase sales.

Advertising is one of the most typical forms of promotion. Classically it would be done by posting on billboards, producing short clips for TV and radio or by physically distributing flyers or leaflets to potential customers. 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 material posted through your door. The potential for individualised advertising has never been so great.

Another significant part of promotion involves branding, which will not necessarily yield more sales directly, but relates back to one of the initial purposes of marketing; getting customers to pick your product over those of your competitors. When all other pieces of the marketing mix are equal it could be branding that sways a customer’s decision.

Putting it into Practise

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