Nearly every company on the planet sets out with the primary objective of earning money. This is generally done by manufacturing some form of product, or offering a service, and then charging people money for it. This fundamental theory is fairly straight-forward, though it contains many specific details.
Firstly, it is a very rare case that a business can offer a product or service that is genuinely unique and cannot be supplied by anyone else. This means that your company will be contesting with other businesses that sell a similar product 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 prospective customers to do business with them and not with their rivals. It is a very extensive topic that is influenced by a great deal of internal and external factors, but when done right it can be the one business practice that can make or break a corporation.
So where should you begin when constructing a marketing strategy for your own business? Well, every situation is different, and every 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 called the “Marketing Mix”.
The Marketing Mix
The marketing mix was a term that was first coined in the 1950’s and is a phrase that is used to describe the fundamental building blocks of any marketing strategy. It reflects the fact that marketing is not a simple, blunt-edged business tool, but rather a delicate balance of different elements of business functions. It got its name since it is similar to the ingredients checklist for a recipe.
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 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 plan.
There are several sales routes available to car swivel seats Birmingham (one of our target product areas) so our organisation applied marketing ideas to open new routes to our customers.
Product
Whilst every aspect of the marketing mix is a necessity, the “product” element mentioned as one of the four P’s is perhaps the most critical 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.
Many people do not think that marketing has any place to play when it comes to the physical 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 opposite 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.
Consider the computer software market as an example. There are many well-known brands of both operating system and software application solutions on the market already, and because the market is relatively well saturated it would be incredibly tough (and expensive) to “take on the big boys”. So how could the principles of the marketing mix assist in this situation?
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 far more effective to look at what types of product are desired in the current marketplace, and how feasible it would be to produce and sell them.
Once your goods have been designed and created it is still a critical skill to be able to objectively evaluate your own products to recognise the reasons that a customer should buy your product rather than a competitors’.
Another form of this part of the marketing mix is known as product variation and is generally used to either prolong the lifecycle of a product currently 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 different engines, trim packages and interior options with the cars that they offer. They use the marketing mix to good effect to sell their own goods in an extremely competitive marketplace.
To maintain a standard corporate image a company ought to update their website an example would be 1TB hard drives that echo colourings, fonts and also graphics associated with their branding.
Price
Another key factor in the marketing mix concerns the price of your products or services. This is not a simple case of performing market research to determine the highest price that your customers would pay (although that can be a useful tool to use), but rather using the price of your products as a strategic weapon designed to achieve any specific targets your business has. The potential advantages of an effective pricing plan are surprisingly large!
Whilst it may seem obvious, it’s still worth noting that price has always been, and likely always will be, one of the crucial factors that customers 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 price. In fact a price that is too low can often turn customers away.
There are many questions that you need to ask yourself when devising a good pricing strategy, key among which are the price sensitivity of your customers, 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 principal 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 prepared to spend a premium amount of money to get a product or service early on. Not only can this approach deliver great financial advantages, but it can also advertise an exclusive and high quality image of your product.
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 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 financial rewards can be made long into the future. It can be a risky strategy, but when employed correctly it can create revenue streams for many years to come.
Another thing to keep in mind is that “price” is the one 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 create or undertake. So it is even more vital to get your pricing strategy right.
To optimise our web site for google marketing we chose DVD for Children for an aimed phrase since it relates to our business and what we do.
Place
Place is the component of the marketing mix that’s often disregarded by companies, but it’s still an important part of selling your product effectively. In short, it describes the way in which you provide your product to your customer, and subsequently how you receive money from them. It can be a fantastic marketing approach when applied appropriately.
The most typical implications of place-based marketing are the physical locations in which your products are sold. For the vast majority of consumer products, this involves the distribution infrastructure between your manufacturing centres and retailers and other outlets around the country. Since distribution of a physical product costs money it is crucial to identify your own priorities and alter your distribution network accordingly. This is the primary use 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 point 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 large pool of potential customers. Effective placing of your product or service can therefore yield impressive economic results.
Promotion
When you mention the word “marketing”, many people instantly think of the promotional aspect of the marketing mix, although as we have seen, this is merely one branch of a more comprehensive system. Promotion can be used on a very individual basis or as a mass communication tool, and whilst it can be an expensive undertaking it is often an important one.
Advertising is one of the most common forms of promotion. Classically it would be done by posting on billboards, creating short clips for TV and radio or by physically handing out flyers or leaflets to potential customers. 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 materials posted through your front door. The potential for individualised advertising has never been so good.
Another significant part of promotion involves branding, which will not necessarily yield more product sales directly, but goes back to one of the initial purposes of marketing; getting customers to choose your product over those of your competitors.
Putting it into Practice
As previously mentioned every business is unique and will have different marketing requirements. By using a balance of the four P’s discussed above you can take a good view of your own marketing strategy.
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