Modern Marketing
Practically 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 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 item 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 increase the chances of them spending money with you?
Marketing is the primary tool used by modern firms 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 can make or break a company. Any time spent on marketing will reap rewards, although spending this time correctly can yield extraordinary results.
So where should you start when creating a marketing strategy for your own business? Well, every situation is different, and each business 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 corporation to be used as a marketing platform.
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 strategy. It demonstrates the fact that marketing is not a straightforward, blunt-edged business tool, but rather a subtle balance of different aspects of business operations.
The term was later built upon 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 swiftly relate the elements of marketing to the strengths of their own companies, and by doing so could very quickly create a personalised and efficient marketing strategy.
Our company created a promotional strategy for our cotton bedding products by using the marketing mix to determine our marketing advantages.
Product
Although every element of the marketing mix is a necessity, 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 company will be offering, 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 actual 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 job of the marketing department to find ways to sell it, right? This is not necessarily the case.
Consider the computer software market as an example. There are many well-known brands of both operating system and software application solutions in the marketplace already, and since the market is fairly well saturated it would be very tough (and expensive) to “take on the big boys”.
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 far 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 critical skill to be able to objectively evaluate your own products to identify the reasons that a customer would buy your product rather than a competitors’. The technique is called product differentiation and forms one of the fundamental skills of the product part of the marketing mix cake.
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 car 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 great effect to sell their own products in an incredibly competitive marketplace. Although these companies may have substantial marketing budgets, the same concepts can be applied to all businesses.
To preserve a standard corporate image a business ought to redesign their portal an example would be easy one pot recipes who echo colourings, fonts and also images associated with their own branding.
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 determine 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 weapon designed to achieve any particular goals your business has. The potential advantages of an effective pricing plan are surprisingly large!
Although it may seem obvious, it’s still worth pointing out 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.
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 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. 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 will be prepared to spend a large amount of money to receive a product or service early on. Not only can this technique yield excellent financial benefits, but it can also advertise an exclusive and high quality image of your product.
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 tailored towards gaining a large market share at a short-term cost so that financial benefits can be earned long into the future. It can be a high risk strategy, but when employed correctly it can setup revenue streams for many years to come. When setting a price for penetration it is still critical to not give a bad impression of your product by aiming for too low a figure.
Yet another thing to keep in mind is that “price” is the one 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 produce or undertake.
Grabbing some of the on-line search market is very beneficial, so choose a key phrase, such as 2TB hard drives and evaluate if that phrase has an ample search marketplace for your needs.
Place
Place is the component of the marketing mix that is often not addressed by companies, but it is still an important part of selling your product effectively. In a nutshell, it describes the way in which you deliver your product to your consumer, and subsequently how you receive money from them. It can be a great marketing technique when applied appropriately.
The most common ramifications of place-based marketing are the physical locations in which your goods are sold. For the vast majority of consumer products, this involves the distribution network between your production plants and shops 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 accordingly. This is the main application of this element 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 point of contact (or even as a whole distribution channel in download-based markets such as MP3s) firms are now able to reach out to a huge pool of possible customers.
Promotion
When you say the word “marketing”, most 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 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.
Advertising is one of the most typical forms of promotion. Typically it would be done by posting on billboards, creating 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 just as targeted advertising material posted through your front door. The potential for individualised advertising has never been so great.
Another important 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 pick your product over those of your competitors.
Putting it into Practice
As previously mentioned each business is unique and will have different marketing needs. By using a balance of the four P’s reviewed above you can take an effective view of your own marketing strategy.
