If you’ve taken any marketing courses, or googled how to market your business, you may have heard about the marketing mix. The marketing mix helps you bring a new product or service to the market. You may have heard of the 4 P’s: Product, Price, Place and Promotion. The marketing mix and the 4 P’s are synonyms for one another. Here’s we’ll go through exactly what the 4 P’s mean.
Product
The product is what you’re bringing to market and is the heart of brand equity. In order for there to be brand loyalty, the product must at least meet, if not, surpass the consumers’ expectations. For example, if you’re a bike shop in the heart of Miami, you need to find a way to surpass consumers’ expectations of a typical bike shop. Maybe you provide amazing customer service, have amazing discounts, or have in stock products that aren’t normally in that area. No matter what your product is, you must work to build brand loyalty in order for it to be successful.
Price
Price is the amount of money you will charge consumers for your product. This is the only element in the marketing mix that provides revenue, the other P’s represent a cost. In this phase you must make sure you understand for your fixed and variable costs. Fixed costs are cost that don’t change when you sell more or less of your product. Variable costs on the other hand, do change when you sell more or less of your product. For example, selling more bikes will not change the rent of your bike shop. Rent is a fixed cost. However, selling more bikes could influence how much the commission of your salespeople will be. Sales commission is a variable cost. By understanding your fixed and variable costs, you will know your total costs for your business. This will help you decide what your product’s pricing should be and how much you need to sell to break-even.
Place
This element refers to the distribution of your product. When introducing a product to the market, you must determine your distribution channel which is how your product from the manufacturer to the consumer. If you’d like a deeper dive into distribution channels click here.
Promotion
Promotion determines how you market your product to consumers. You can use paid advertising, content marketing, social media marketing, inbound and outbound marketing and many other methods to promote your product. Visit my blog where I share tips and tricks to promote and grow your business.
Final Thoughts
The marketing mix is an essential part of your marketing plan and should always be used to develop your strategies when introducing new products to the market. It will help you organize the basic elements of your business so you can then move onto planning the deeper details.
If you’re just starting a business and found this blog post helpful, check out my latest post on the important brand elements needed for a business name.
