Nearly every company on the planet sets out with the primary objective of making money. This is generally done by manufacturing some form of product, or offering a service, and then charging people money for it.

Firstly, it is a very rare case where a company can offer a product or service that is genuinely unique and cannot be provided by anyone else. This means that your company 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 money once.

Marketing is the primary 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 number of internal and external variables, but when done well it can be the one business practise that can make or break a corporation.

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 rule that can be applied to almost any corporation to be used as a marketing platform. 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 an expression that is used to describe the fundamental building blocks of any marketing system. It demonstrates the fact that marketing is not a simple, blunt-edged business tool, but rather a subtle balance of different aspects of business functions.

The term was later developed to include the concept of “four P’s” that described the critical elements of the marketing mix. The formalisation of these P’s made it very easy for business managers and marketers to quickly relate the elements of marketing to the strengths of their own organisations, and by doing so could very rapidly form a tailored and effective marketing system. The four P’s are Product, Price, Place and Promotion.

Our organisation has risen to be a leader in back pain treatment Ruddington since employing tailored marketing ideas across our entire range of products.

Product

Although every element of the marketing mix is a requirement, 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 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 make it through.

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 common train of thought very often bears the precise opposite sentiment. Surely it should be the other way around – your production department creates a product 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.

Take the computer software market as an example. There are many established brands of both operating system and software application products on the marketplace already, and since the market is relatively well saturated it would be incredibly tough (and expensive) to “take on the big boys”.

Rather than creating an operating system and then trying 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 feasible it would be to produce 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 designed and created it is still a critical 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’.

A different form of this part of the marketing mix is known as product variation and is generally used to either extend the lifecycle of a product already in the market, or to make your new product attractive to as many customers as possible.

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

We do not have a specific marketing team within our new xbox hard drive price enterprise although many of our managers have been able to adopt marketing as part of their work role.

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 useful tool to use), but rather using the price of your products as a strategic tool designed to achieve any particular targets your business has.

Although it may seem obvious, it is still worth noting that price has always been, and likely 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 when devising a good pricing strategy, 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 though, pricing can be covered by two main principals; price skimming and penetration pricing. These are outlined below.

Price skimming

The main idea behind price skimming is to make as much money as possible from the sector 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 technique deliver excellent economic advantages, but it can also promote an exclusive and high quality image of your item.

This pricing technique 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. Manufacturers could set almost any price they wanted to and there would still be a loyal core of customers that would pay it.

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 financial rewards can be earned long into the future. It can be a high risk strategy, but when used correctly it can setup revenue streams for many years to come. When establishing a price for penetration it is still important to not give a poor impression of your product by aiming for too low a figure.

Another thing to bear 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 carry out.

To optimise our web site for search engine visibility we selected bean chairs and childrens bean bags for an aimed phrase since it relates to our business and what we offer.

Place

Place is the component of the marketing mix that is often overlooked by companies, but it is still an important part of selling your product effectively. In a nutshell, it describes the method in which you deliver your product to your consumer, and consequently how you receive money from them.

The most common ramifications of place-based marketing are the physical locations in which your products are sold. For the majority of consumer products, this includes the distribution infrastructure between your manufacturing plants and retailers and other outlets around the world. Since distribution of a physical product costs money it is important to determine your own priorities and adjust your distribution network appropriately.

With the growing use of the Internet by your prospective customers, marketing strategies have had to consider how they use the Internet to help deliver their products. By using the Internet as a place of contact (or even as a complete distribution route in download-based markets such as MP3s) companies are now able to reach out to a huge pool of possible customers. Effective placing of your product or service can therefore yield impressive economic results.

Promotion

When you say 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 comprehensive 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.

Advertising is one of the most common forms of promotion. Typically 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 coming of the information age we have seen a great increase in promotion via e-mail and the Internet, or just as targeted advertising material posted through your door.

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

Putting it into Practise

As previously mentioned each business is different 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 strategy.