Modern Marketing
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 that a company can offer a product or service that is genuinely unique and cannot be provided by anyone 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 money once. So how can you boost the chances of them spending money with you?
Marketing is the main tool used by modern organisations 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 deal of internal and external variables, but when done well it can be the single business practice that can make or break a company.
So where should you start when constructing a marketing strategy for your own company? Well, every situation is different, and every business will have its own set of strengths and weaknesses that must be taken into consideration, but there is a marketing principle that can be applied to almost any corporation to be used as a marketing framework.
The Marketing Mix
The marketing mix was a term that was first coined in the 1950’s and is an expression 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 subtle balance of different aspects of business functions.
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 business managers and marketers to swiftly relate the elements of marketing to the strengths of their own organisations, and by doing so could very rapidly form a personalised and effective marketing system.
Almost every segment in the modern marketplace is competitive, particularly bed throws, where proper promotional decisions can mean the success or failure of the company.
Product
Although every aspect of the marketing mix is a necessity, the “product” element mentioned as one of the four P’s is possibly 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 buyers are going to spend money with you. If this part is not correctly managed then your organisation will find it hard to survive.
Several people do not 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 production department creates an item for sale and then it is the job of the marketing department to find ways to sell it, right? This is not always the case.
Consider the computer software market as an example. There are many established brands of both operating system as well as software application products on the marketplace already, and since 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 assist in this situation?
Rather than creating an operating system and then trying to craft a marketing strategy to take on the likes of Microsoft or 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. By being mindful of the marketing mix early on in your product development cycle you can prevent business dead-ends at a later time.
Once your goods have been fashioned and created it is still a vital skill to be able to objectively review your own products to identify the reasons why a customer would buy your product rather than a competitors’.
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 new product attractive to as many consumers 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 products in an incredibly competitive marketplace. Whilst these companies may have huge marketing budgets, the same concepts can be applied to all companies.
To preserve a standard corporate image a company should redesign their site an example we found was maytag refrigerators that echo colourings, text and also graphics associated with their own branding.
Price
Another key factor in the marketing mix concerns the price of your products or services. This isn’t a simple case of performing market research to determine the top price that your customers would spend (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.
Although it may seem obvious, it is still worth noting that price has always been, and probably 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 constantly consider the lowest price to be the best value.
There are many questions that you need to ask yourself while devising a good pricing plan, key among 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 also 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 are going to be prepared to spend a large amount of money to receive a product or service early on.
This pricing strategy 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 base of customers that would pay it.
Penetration pricing
Penetration pricing is at the other 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 risky strategy, but when used correctly it can create revenue streams for many years to come.
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 create or carry out. So it is even more vital to get your pricing technique right.
Before our company began studying online promoting for Greek worry beads there did not seem an obvious choice of key phrase to use as our primary focus.
Place
Place is the portion of the marketing mix that’s often not addressed 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 receive money from them. It can be a great marketing approach when used correctly.
The most common implications 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 manufacturing centres and retailers or 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. This is the primary application of this element of the marketing mix.
With the increasing use of the Internet by your potential customers, marketing methods 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 whole 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”, many 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 can be an expensive undertaking it is often an essential one.
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 handing out 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 just as targeted advertising material posted through your door.
Another important part of promotion involves branding, which will not necessarily yield more sales directly, but relates 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 sways a customer’s decision.
Putting it into Practice
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 strategy.