Nearly every business on the planet sets out with the main objective of earning money. This is generally done by producing some form of product, or offering a service, and then charging people money for it. This fundamental principle is fairly straight-forward, although it contains many intricate details.

Firstly, it is a very rare case where a business can offer a product or service that is genuinely unique and cannot be supplied by anyone else. This means that your enterprise will be contesting 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.

Marketing is the main tool used by modern businesses to draw potential customers to do business with them and not with their rivals. It is a very broad topic that is affected by a great deal of internal and external variables, 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 correctly can yield incredible results.

So where should you start when constructing a marketing strategy for your own company? Well, every situation is different, and each company will have its own set of advantages and flaws 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 framework.

The Marketing Mix

The marketing mix was a phrase that was first coined during the 1950′s and is a phrase that is used to describe the fundamental building blocks of any marketing strategy. It demonstrates the fact that marketing is not a straightforward, blunt-edged business technique, but rather a delicate balance of different aspects of business operations.

The term was later developed to include the idea of “four P’s” that described the critical elements of the marketing mix. The formalisation of these P’s made it very easy for company managers and marketers to quickly 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 system. The four P’s are; Product, Price, Place and Promotion.

Marketing is a worldwide business concept and could get applied to advertising & promotional balloons as well as almost any amount of other 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 business will be offering, and at the end of the day it is the reason that customers are going to spend money with you. If this part is not correctly managed then your company will find it hard to survive.

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 common train of thought very often bears the exact opposite sentiment. Surely it should be the opposite way around – your production department creates an item for sale and then it is the task of the marketing department to find ways to sell it, right? This is not always the case.

Take the computer software market as an example. There are many well-known brands of both operating system as well as software application products on the market 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 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 desired in the current marketplace, and how viable it would be to produce and sell them. By being mindful of the marketing mix early on in your product development cycle you can prevent business dead-ends at a later time.

Once your goods have been designed and created it is still a vital 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 skill 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 lengthen the lifecycle of a product already in the market, or to make your new product attractive to as many consumers as possible.

The car industry uses this approach very effectively by offering different 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.

One of the newest forms of public advertising is via websites that offer versatile and accessible means to reach potential consumers.

Price

Another key 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 spend (although that can be a handy tool to use), but rather making use of the price of your products as a strategic tool designed to achieve any particular goals your business has. The potential advantages of an effective pricing plan are surprisingly substantial!

Whilst it may seem obvious, it’s still worth pointing out that price has always been, and probably always will be, one of the key factors that shoppers take into account when they are making a purchase. It is also worth noting that customers do not always consider the lowest price to be the best price.
There are many questions that you need to ask yourself while devising a good pricing strategy, key amongst which are the price sensitivity of your clients, what your rivals are doing and how can pricing maximise your own profits. From a strategy point of view however, pricing can be covered by two primary principals; price skimming and penetration pricing.

Price skimming

The principal idea behind 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 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 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 core 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 rewards can be earned long into the future. It can be a risky strategy, but when used correctly it can create revenue streams for many years to come.

Another thing to keep in mind is that “price” is the only 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 carry out. So it is even more vital to get your pricing technique right.

To optimize our website for search engine visibility we selected award sashes as a targeted key phrase because it relates to our business and what we offer.

Place

Place is the portion of the marketing mix that is often not addressed by companies, but it is still a significant part of selling your product successfully. In a nutshell, it describes the method in which you deliver your product to your customer, and consequently how you collect money from them. It can be a fantastic marketing technique when used appropriately.

The most common implications of place-based marketing are the physical locations in which your goods are sold. For the majority of consumer products, this involves the distribution infrastructure between your manufacturing plants and shops and other outlets around the country. Since distribution of a physical product costs money it is crucial to identify your own priorities and adjust your distribution network appropriately. This is the primary use of this part of the marketing mix.

With the increasing 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 an entire distribution route in download-based markets such as MP3s) firms are now able to reach out to a huge pool of possible customers. Effective positioning of your product or service can therefore deliver impressive financial results.

Promotion

When you say the word “marketing”, most people immediately 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 employed on a very individual basis or as a mass communication tool, and whilst it might be an expensive undertaking it is often an essential 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 distributing flyers or leaflets to potential buyers. With the coming of the information age we have seen a great increase in promotion via e-mail and the Internet, or just as targeted advertising material posted through your door. The potential for individualised advertising has never been so great.

Another important part of promotion involves branding, which will not necessarily yield more sales directly, but goes back to one of the preliminary functions of marketing; getting customers to choose your product over those of your rivals.

Putting it into Practice

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

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