Tuesday, December 21, 2010

The marketing mix

The marketing mix

In order to achieve your marketing objectives you need to have a strategy that includes different elements - the various parts of the marketing mix. Calling it a mix reminds you to try and get the balance right between the different elements. It is easy to assume that one part of the mix is wrong, when in fact it is another. For example, if take-up of a newly-priced service is poor, it could be that the answer is to change the service, or to deliver it in a way that is more convenient to the user, or to improve the quality of the promotion (rather than to cut the price).
McCarthy identified the four P's of the marketing mix:
  • Product Defining the characteristics of your product or service to meet the customers' needs.
  • Price: Deciding on a pricing strategy. Even if you decide not to charge for a service, it is useful to realise that this is still a pricing strategy. Identifying the total cost to the user (which is likely to be higher than the charge you make) is a part of the price element.
  • Promotion This includes advertising, personal selling (eg attending exhibitions), sales promotions (eg special offers), and atmospherics (creating the right impression through the working environment). Public Relations is included within Promotion by many marketing people (though PR people tend to see it as a separate discipline).
  • Place or distribution. Looking at location (eg of a library) and where a service is delivered (eg are search results delivered to the user's desktop, office, pigeonhole - or do they have to collect them).
There are two ways to impress bluffers.
You can extend the number of P's - the two which are usually seen as useful additions for services (including information services) are:
  • People Good information services are not likely to be delivered by people who are unskilled or demotivated;
  • Process The way in which the user gets hold of the service (eg the way in which a document or a search can be ordered).
The second way to show your marketing knowledge is to dismiss the P's as being as old fashioned as the 1980s For example, there are the C's developed by Robert Lauterborn (1) and put forward by Philip Kotler:
  • Place becomes Convenience
  • Price becomes Cost to the user
  • Promotion becomes Communication
  • Product becomes Customer needs and wants
These C's reflect a more client-oriented marketing philosophy. They provide useful reminders - for example that you need to bear in mind the convenience of the client when deciding where to offer a service. Some would argue that the marketing mix is too product-oriented, and that modern marketing should not focus on it. However, it does provide a handy framework for marketing analysis. The C's are also not nearly so memorable as the P-words, and marketing texts still tend to use the latter to describe the elements of the mix. If numbers less than 10 don't impress you, you can go for Evert Gummesson's 30Rs of relationship marketing (2), from Relationship one ("the classic dyad: the relationship between supplier and customer") to Relationship 30 ("the owner and financier relationship").

1. Lauterborn, Bob. (1990) "New marketing litany: four Ps passe: C-words take over." Advertising age. 61 (41), 26.
2. Gummesson, Evert. (2002) Total relationship marketing 2nd ed. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann.
Super-bluffers can dismiss McCarthy and Kotler , and reinvent the P's or C's as (for example) the S's or the D's. If you can think of appropriate words and phrases, all beginning with the same letter, you probably deserve to be a marketing guru. On the other hand, you could take a quantitative approach and try to find 101 words beginning with the letter 'P' that all have some relationship, however tenuous, with marketing.

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