Understanding the Marketing Mix: The 4Ps Explained

Is your product or service meeting the needs of customers?

Where are your customers actually engaging with your brand?

What is the value of your product?

How is your product different and how can you express this?

These are major questions in any business and the 4Ps of marketing will help you to answer them.

A concept developed in the 1960s, the 4 Ps of marketing, often referred to as the ‘marketing mix’, are the key factors you need to consider when deciding how to market your good or service. It stands for product, price, place, and promotion, all of which are influenced by many internal and external factors of your business environment.

When you consult the 4 Ps in terms of your marketing, this will help you to formulate a plan to reach your customers. Framing your marketing around this concept will help you to understand what your competition is up to and what your customers are wanting from you. 

So what does product, price, place, and promotion actually mean?

Product

Well, what exactly are you selling? Product refers to to the good or service that your business offers. Ideally, your product should fulfill an existing need that your customers have, or otherwise be compelling enough to drive new demand. This can be used to help determine the following 3 Ps. When you are defining your product, ask yourself the following questions:

What makes my product or service unique in the market?

Why would customers choose and pay for my product over the competition?

If you don’t have an answer to these questions, it’s time to do some reassessing. 

Price 

Price is the cost you put on your product for customers to purchase. When determining the price of your product you need to consider the real and perceived value of the product, production costs, market fluctuations, and competitor’s price. 

It is also important to consider the status you want your business to hold in the market. Do you want to be known as the high-end, high-priced option or the affordable, customer-friendly option for the everyday consumer? This decision will impact the customers you target and therefore, will influence the following 2 Ps.

Place

Place is determining where and how you can get your products in front of interested customers. This could be either brick and mortar or a digital space. Consider which sales channels will help you best reach your target customer and ask yourself the following:

How can I make my product more physically available for my customers to find?

From there, you will need to consider how to market your product in a way that reaches these interested customers, represents your brand, and drives customers towards your sales channels.

Promotion

As you have probably guessed, promotion is your promotional strategy and how you advertise your product. The goal of this is to tell customers why they need your product.

When it comes to promotion, it is important to remember that this is how your business is communicating with its customers and attempting to persuade their buying decisions, so consider the following:

Is your brand message relatable to your target market?

What channels can you utilise to best reach your customers and promote your product to them?

Remember, every interaction a customer has with your brand forms part of their customer journey, so make sure you’re sending the right message and that it represents your brand.

When developing your marketing mix, the most important part is understanding your customers, your competition, and the type of business you want to be. Even though this concept was developed along time ago and marketing has developed a lot since then, the fundamental elements of marketing remain the same. It’s tried and true! 

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