webloglexicon.com

Practically every business on the planet sets out with the main objective of earning money. This is usually done by producing some form of product, or offering a service, and then charging people money for it. This fundamental theory is fairly straight-forward, although it contains many intricate 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 provided by anyone else. This means that your company will be competing with other businesses that sell a similar product and you will both be trying to earn money from the same shoppers, who only want to spend their money once.

Marketing is the primary tool used by modern organisations to draw prospective customers to do business with them and not with their rivals. It is a very extensive topic that is influenced by a great number of internal and external factors, but when done right it can be the single business practice that could make or break a corporation. Any time spent on marketing will reap benefits, although spending this time efficiently can yield extraordinary outcomes.

So where should you begin when constructing a marketing strategy for your own company? Well, every situation is different, and each 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 platform. It is known as 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 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 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 company managers and marketers to quickly associate 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.

There are several income routes available to event planning so our own business used marketing ideas to open new paths to our customers.

 

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 crucial of all. It identifies the physical product or intangible service that your business will be offering, 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 make it through.

Several people don’t 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 manufacturing department creates a product for sale and then it is the job of the marketing department to discover 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 and 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”.

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 types of product are sought after in the current marketplace, and how viable it would be to produce and sell them. By being aware of the marketing mix early on in your product development period you can avoid business dead-ends at a later stage.

Once your products have been designed 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’.

A different form of this part of the marketing mix is known as product variation and is typically used to either prolong the lifecycle of a product currently in the market, or to make your new product attractive to as many consumers as possible. Once again, this technique can be applied at all stages of product development.

The motor 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 incredibly competitive marketplace.

As part of our own promotion method, our business carefully researched what made our goods stand out from the masses.

It is incredibly common to come across a significant number of conference production companies that budget for manufacturing and product sales but not adequately for marketing.

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 pay (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 particular targets your business has. The potential advantages of an effective pricing strategy are surprisingly substantial!

Whilst 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 cheapest price to be the best value. Actually a price that is too low can sometimes turn customers away.

There are many questions that you need to ask yourself when devising a good pricing plan, key among which are the price sensitivity of your clients, what your rivals 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.

Price skimming

The main idea driving price skimming is to make as much money as possible from the sector of the market which is price-insensitive and are going to be willing to spend a premium amount of money to get a product or service early on.

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. 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 tailored towards gaining a large market share at a short-term cost so that monetary benefits can be made long into the future. It can be a risky strategy, but when used correctly it can setup revenue streams for many years to come. When setting a price for penetration it is still important 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 revenue for a business. The other members of the four P’s will all cost money to produce or undertake. So it is even more essential to get your pricing technique right.

Our business wanted to appeal to a broader marketplace and targeting integrated washing machine helped increase our precense within the international business network.

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 effectively. In a nutshell, it describes the way in which you deliver your product to your customer, and subsequently how you collect money from them.

The most typical ramifications of place-based marketing are the physical venues in which your products are sold. For the vast majority of consumer products, this includes the distribution infrastructure between your production plants and shops and other outlets around the country. 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 use of this element of the marketing mix.

With the growing use of the Internet by your prospective customers, marketing techniques have had to take into account how they use the Internet to help deliver their products. By using the Internet as a point of contact (or even as a whole distribution channel in download-based markets such as MP3s) companies are now able to reach out to a huge pool of potential customers.

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 used 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 primary 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 distributing flyers or leaflets to potential buyers. 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 material posted through your door.

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

Putting it into Practice

As previously mentioned every company is different and will have different marketing needs. By using a balance of the four P’s discussed above you can take an effective view of your own marketing strategy.