including Product, Price, Place, and Promotion in marketing. This guide will adequately explain how to use these four marketing mix elements in your marketing campaigns!
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Product: Definition & Characteristics
A product is anything that can be offered to a market for attention, acquisition, use, or consumption that might satisfy a want or need.
A marketer thinks a product has two key characteristics: * Tangible – The item has a physical existence * Intangible – The article does not physically exist. Still, its benefits do (e.g., Car insurance). In short, if it can be touched, then it’s tangible, while things like loyalty programs are intangible products.
A product is anything that can be offered to a market for attention, acquisition, use, or consumption. From toothpaste to bank loans to ebooks and beyond. Anything that you might sell in your business falls into this category.
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Price: Definition & Calculation
A price is the value of a product expressed in terms of money. The pricing process entails deciding how much a specific customer is willing to pay for a given product/service and what price will allow the seller to maximize profits without turning away any customers. Pricing Methods There are many different ways companies go about setting their prices… * Cost-based approach –
Take all costs related to producing/selling the good and add some profit margin * Competition-based approach – Check what the competition is doing and match * Market-oriented approach – The price that customers are willing to pay * Psychological pricing – Charging more for a product than its competitors do (98 vs. $89) This is also known as “Smart Pricing.”
Psychological pricing allows marketers to charge what they think will be competitively high prices to increase profits. It has been shown that consumers perceive expensive products better than cheaper ones, even if there isn’t much difference between them.
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Place: Definition & Objectives
The term “Place” refers to making the product or service convenient for potential buyers to contact or purchase. It could be putting it into supermarkets, pharmacies, stores, etc. It is essential to get the product or service into the hands of the target market who will use it.
The objectives for this “place” factor can vary depending on what you’re selling… * Availability – Can potential customers quickly obtain the product/service? * Accessibility – Can they physically reach a store that sells it? * Convenience – Is there an in-store promotion happening when they are in front of your products? Overcoming any barriers in getting close to your audience is crucial for them to spend money with you, which leads us to our next point…
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Promotion: Definition & Techniques
A promotion is an encouragement to buy or continue buying a product or service. Under the umbrella of promotion, marketers have many tools to promote a particular product or service to increase its market share. These tools include advertising, public relations, direct marketing, and sales promotion.
Marketing promotions are a mix of common sense and creativity from marketers which aims to achieve one of the following:
- Changing what consumers think about your brand
- Altering beliefs about your brand’s benefits
- Attracting new customers to purchase your products/services. In short, you’re trying to get people interested in what is being sold
A simple definition refers to the process of “drawing attention” towards something. For example, marketing campaigns try to make sure their target audiences see them as much as possible to maximize the chances of those audiences choosing their products/services over a competitor’s.
* Strategizing a marketing campaign – Before any crucial sales or marketing activities, companies must plan for the first.
This includes doing market research and considering things like budgeting and timing before they can be confident their chosen strategies are successful.
What is Marketing? – Definition & Strategy
Definition: “Marketing is the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of ideas, goods, services.”
In other words… The purpose of marketing is to make your product known to consumers via specific channels (e.g., Digital Media vs. TV Ads), thus resulting in increased sales for your company! Marketing Strategies boil down to two main approaches:
- Targeting existing consumers of a product or service (market penetration)
- Attempting to attract new consumers (market development) The definition and objectives of marketing strategies will vary depending on which approach you’re using and what kind of product/service you’re selling. For example, if we go back to our clothing company example from earlier in this article…
Analogous to the human brain’s neurotransmitters, neuromarketing seeks to “explore consumers’ subconscious responses” as they pertain specifically to purchasing decisions.
This is achieved by scanning the brains of test subjects exposed both to promotional content and products themselves via Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) technology.
By exploring how different factors affect consumer behavior, neuromarketing has the potential to dramatically reduce the amount of time and resources required for new product development.
Pricing: Strategies & Theory
A price is how much a customer needs to pay for your products or services. Marketing pricing can be primarily divided into cost-based and value-based pricing. * Customers making buying decisions based on “value” (i.e., what they think it’s worth) * Customers make buying decisions based on “price” (i.e., how much it costs them)
ple, marketers will often try to find that sweet spot in terms of perceived value where customers are happy to purchase their product for a high price because it provides more value than they expected.
Distribution Channels & Techniques
Before you can begin making sales, marketers first have to figure out how they’re going to get their products or services into the hands of customers! “Distribution” refers to the various channels used to make physical contact with your target market after an order is placed.
teams just focusing on distribution. For example, let’s say our clothing company has decided on some marketing strategies and now wants to put them into action.
The Marketing team will then work together with the Sales team (and perhaps even Manufacturing/Operations) to carry out their plans.
They would first define the marketing goals regarding sales and projected revenue, then determine which distribution channel they want to use (e.g., selling through bricks & mortar stores, online web stores, etc.).
They would then research which particular approach is best suited for that channel, choose the most likely to succeed, implement it (and follow up on its results).
Essential Marketing Channels
Digital Media –
dcast yourself by leveraging social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter & Instagram. Utilize digital advertisement with companies like Google & Yahoo! or via services like Social Mention Curate your brand online by keeping a blog or even an e-commerce store with something like Shopify *Digital distribution of your products or services with the help of companies like Netflix, Spotify & Steam.
Traditional Marketing – “Getting it out there” is the most common type of marketing seen in today’s advertising-focused world. Although traditional techniques are still commonly used by businesses, they’re gradually being replaced or supplemented by various other forms of marketing, which will be explained later in this article. By far, the most well-known traditional technique is television/radio ads.
