Nearly every business on the planet sets out with the primary 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 theory is fairly straight-forward, though 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 genuinely 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 shoppers, who only want to spend their cash once. So how can you increase the chances of them spending money with you?
Marketing is the main tool used by modern businesses to draw prospective customers to do business with them and not with their rivals. It is a very broad topic that is influenced 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.
So where should you begin when creating a marketing strategy for your own company? Well, every situation is different, and each business will have its own set of strengths and flaws 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 framework. It is called the “Marketing Mix”.
The Marketing Mix
The marketing mix was a term that was first coined during the 1950’s and is a phrase that is used to express the fundamental building blocks of any marketing system. It reflects the fact that marketing is not a simple, blunt-edged business technique, but rather a delicate 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 easy for business managers and marketers to quickly associate the elements of marketing to the strengths of their own organisations, and by doing so could very quickly form a tailored and effective marketing plan.
Marketing is a worldwide business idea which may be applied to conferences as well as any number of different products and services.
Product
Although every element 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 describes the physical product or intangible service that your company will be offering, and at the end of the day it is the reason that buyers 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 company 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 an item for sale and then it is the job of the marketing department to discover ways to sell it, right? This is not necessarily 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 in 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 developing an operating system and then trying to craft a marketing strategy to take on the likes of Microsoft or 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 produce and sell them.
Once your goods have been fashioned and created it is still a vital 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’. The skill is called product differentiation and is 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 called product variation and is generally used to either prolong the lifecycle of a product already in the market, or to make your new product attractive to as many customers as possible. Again, this method can be applied at all stages of product development.
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 extremely competitive marketplace.
As part of our individual marketing method, our business carefully studied exactly what made our goods stand out from the masses.
It is incredibly common to find a large number of conference production companies that budget for production and 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 determine the highest 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 weapon designed to achieve any particular targets your business has.
Whilst it may seem obvious, it is still worth pointing out that price has always been, and probably 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 do not always consider the cheapest price to be the best price.
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 customers, what your rivals are doing and how can pricing boost your own profits. From a strategy point of view however, pricing can be covered by two main principals; price skimming and penetration pricing.
Price skimming
The main idea behind price skimming is to make as much cash as possible from the sector 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. Not only can this approach yield excellent financial benefits, but it can also advertise an exclusive and high quality image of your product.
This pricing technique is frequently 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 almost any price they wanted to and there would still be a loyal base of customers that would pay it. By making use of this method as part of a pre-ordering strategy, a firm can help to smooth its own cash flow.
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 employed correctly it can setup revenue streams for many years to come.
Yet another thing to keep 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.
It is incredibly difficult to discover a large number of Mens novelty aprons stockists who plan for manufacturing and sales as well as adequately for marketing.
Place
Place is the component of the marketing mix that’s often overlooked by companies, but it is still an important part of selling your product successfully. In short, it describes the method in which you deliver your product to your customer, and consequently how you collect money from them.
The most typical implications of place-based marketing are the physical locations in which your products are sold. For the majority of consumer products, this includes the distribution network between your production centres and retailers and other outlets around the world. Since distribution of a physical product costs money it is important to identify your own priorities and adjust your distribution network appropriately. This is the primary application of this element of the marketing mix.
With the increasing use of the Internet by your potential customers, marketing strategies have had to consider how they use the Internet to help distribute their products. By using the Internet as a place of contact (or even as a complete distribution channel 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”, 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 employed on a very individual basis or as a mass communication instrument, and whilst it can be a costly undertaking it is often an essential 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 handing out flyers or leaflets to potential buyers. 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 materials 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 preliminary functions of marketing; getting customers to pick your product over those of your rivals.
Putting it into Practice
As previously mentioned every 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 plan.