The marketing mix consists of the tools used by the organisation to create a desired response among its target market. It is commonly referred to as the '4 Ps' model. Developing a marketing mix requires variation in the 4 Ps as shown in the following figure:
The following video will provide you with a good introduction to the marketing mix and how marketers can apply it.
A company’s marketing mix can vary between countries to account for factors such as:
- Product and technical standards
- Culture differences
- Competitive conditions
- Distribution systems
- Economic conditions
- Government regulations, and so on.
Due to these factors, it is rare for a company to use one standard marketing mix globally.
Case study: McDonald’s
McDonald’s is thought of as having global standardisation amongst its products. However, the marketing mix does vary slightly between countries. By adjusting to different markets, McDonald's has varied their menu and distribution strategy. For example, countries that do not rely on commuting by car have restaurants in places with high pedestrian traffic. In less populated countries where car transportation is common, restaurants offer their meals through drive-through methods.
This example illustrates how it is normal to customise the marketing mix in countries with distinct characteristics to pursue marketing objectives in the target market.
Understanding the marketing mix
Marketing is about putting the right product in the right place at the right time.
To achieve this effectively, a lot of hard work is needed to find out what customers want and identify where they do their shopping. Then you need to figure out how to produce the item at a price that represents value to them and get it all to come together at the critical time.
‘But if you get just one element wrong, it can spell disaster. You could be left promoting a car with amazing fuel economy in a country where fuel is very cheap or selling an item at a price that's too high – or too low – to attract the people you're targeting. The marketing mix and the 4Ps are great tools that can help you avoid these kinds of mistakes.’ (The Marketing Mix and the 4Ps: Understanding How to Position Your Market Offering, 2021)
The 4 Ps of marketing is a structure for improving the components of your marketing mix. It assists you in defining your marketing options in terms of product, price, promotion, and place to ensure that your product fulfils a certain customer need or demand.
Any successful marketing strategy must be revisited regularly. When working on a 4 Ps plan, remember that the elements of the first marketing mix you establish are not supposed to be static. They are meant to be tweaked and enhanced as your company's product evolves and your target market shifts.
Product
Product refers to goods or services that a company offers consumers or a 'bundle of attributes'. It is the primary element of the marketing mix strategy and focuses on meeting the consumers' demands and needs by matching them with the product's attributes. The following table demonstrates attributes that may come with specific products.
| Product | Attributes |
|---|---|
| BMW |
|
| Hilton Hotel and Resorts |
|
| Sushi |
|
The following questions are important when configuring the marketing mix for a product.
- Do consumers have similar needs across international segments?
- How is the product (purchased by the consumers in the international market segments) targeted?
- What are consumers' perceptions of the product brand in the international market segments?
- How are established and new products managed for consumers in the international market segments?
Many of the most popular products were the first in their respective categories.
Case study: Apple
“Apple, for example, was the first company to develop a touchscreen smartphone capable of playing music, browsing the Internet, and making phone calls. As of November 2018, Apple stopped providing public sales figures for the iPhone. However, as of November 1, 2018, total sales of the iPhone equalled $2.2 billion. Apple revealed that it had sold its one billionth iOS device on November 22, 2014. And in 2018, the company announced they were approaching selling their two billionth iOS device.” (Owen, 2021)
Price
The price of a product or service is the monetary value that customers are expected to exchange for it. Marketers must link the pricing to the product's perceived worth, supplier costs, seasonal reductions, and rival prices. Business executives may boost the price to give the goods the illusion of being a luxury items. Alternatively, they may reduce the price to encourage more people to try the product.
Marketers must also decide when and whether discounting is necessary. A discount may attract more customers, but it may also give the impression that the product is not unique or luxurious when it is priced lower.
Case study: UNIQLO
“UNIQLO, headquartered in Japan, is a global casual wear clothing manufacturer. Like its competitors—other famous casual wear brands such as Gap and Zara—UNIQLO creates low-price, daily-use garments. What makes UNIQLO unique is that it creates innovative, high-quality products. It can accomplish this by procuring its fabric from its material manufacturer partners, and securing stable, high-quality materials at low cost by ordering in large volumes. Furthermore, continuously seeking the highest-quality and lowest-cost material in the world.” (Narita, 2021)
Promotion
Promotion is the most important component of the marketing mix. When a business wants to advertise its product, it uses a communication approach called promotion. A business's strategy to promote its product can be communicated utilising distribution channel-specific methods. They may use communication tactics to express their potential message about the product's attributes to their customers at other times.
Case study: Absolut
“Absolut, a Swedish vodka brand, sold 10,000 cases of their vodka in the United States in 1980. By 2000, however, that number had risen to 4.5 million cases, thanks in part to a marketing campaign highlighting Absolut's trademark bottle in a series of strange visuals. Consumers liked spotting one of the 1,500 ads in magazines and on billboards, whether the bottle had a halo, was formed of stone, or was just an outline of trees on an alpine ski slope. There are so many adverts that a website called Absolut Ad has taken upon itself to gather them all. Absolut's bottles have the longest-running continuous ad campaign of all time (1981 to 2005)”. (17 iconic ad campaigns that changed the world, 2021)
Place (distribution)
When a company chooses a location, it attempts to identify where it should sell a product and distribute it to the market. The ultimate goal of business owners is to get their products in front of the people who are most likely to buy them. This can refer to putting a product in certain stores and putting a product on a specific store's display. Product placement can refer to the act of placing a product in television broadcasts, films, or web pages to draw attention to it.
Case study: Amazon
“Amazon sells more goods than any one person could count – but the e-commerce giant’s true “core product” is convenience and how quickly it can get an order from customers’ virtual shopping carts to their real-life doorsteps. Part of what makes it so easy for Amazon to offer two-day or even same-day shipping to customers is its vast network of distribution centres, which are located across the U.S. and the rest of the world and store and ship products to their final destinations’ distribution centre network over the past decade has been key to Amazon’s growth strategy.” (How Amazon Delivers on Its Core Product: Convenience - Knowledge@Wharton, 2021)
A bonus P: People
Anyone directly or indirectly involved in the organisation's business side is referred to as "people" in the marketing mix. That includes anybody involved in selling, designing, promoting, managing teams, representing customers, recruiting and training for a product or service. Everyone who represents the business (including chatbots) must be pleasant, professional, knowledgeable, and well prepared if you want your brand to succeed and your clients to be satisfied. Employees must be able to address client concerns.
Businesses must provide training, appropriate working conditions, and everything else that will ensure their people are happy and good brand ambassadors.
Case study: Airbnb
Airbnb, a community marketplace for people to list and book accommodations worldwide, was founded in 2008 in San Francisco, California. Since then, Airbnb has grown to 1,500,000+ listings in 34,000+ cities worldwide. A large contributor to the company's explosive global success? Its video campaign is titled “Made Possible by Hosts.” Airbnb's most significant focus is on people. Excellent hosts create more traffic to their websites. Interpersonal relationships between hosts and travellers build lasting connections and lifelong customers.
You have gained a solid understanding of the marketing mix as a marketer. It is important always to take the time and do the research to understand what your market is after and whether the product you are promoting addresses the gap in the target market.
There are five marketing management orientations, also known as the five marketing concepts. The orientations (or concepts) focus on different techniques for creating, producing and marketing consumer goods and services. It is an approach that focuses on identifying customer interests and desires to develop products and services to suit these needs. You could say the marketing management orientations are the guiding philosophy of marketing.
The five concepts (or orientations) are:
- Production
- Product
- Selling
- Marketing
- Societal marketing.
While marketers and marketing teams can usually determine the business's marketing methods, they cannot always dictate the marketing orientation.
Have a closer look at each of them in more detail.
Production concept
A production concept or orientation is all about how products are manufactured, and not much effort is put into knowing the customer. It assumes that consumers will prefer readily available and reasonably priced things.
Product concept
This orientation is entirely focused on the product: nicer, better, cheaper..., rather than the consumer and what they actually want and need.
Selling concept
This involves an aggressive marketing approach to any and every customer possible. It makes little difference who this customer is or why they would require the product, which usually results in a short-term customer connection.
Marketing concept
The marketing concept is all about understanding the requirements and expectations of target markets and exceeding their expectations. As a result, the marketing concept adopts an outside-in approach, beginning with the consumer’s demands and attempting to locate the best products for them.
Societal marketing concept
The societal marketing concept considers not just what the client wants today but also what society wants now and, in the future, emphasises the importance of satisfying society's long-term interests.
These marketing-oriented approaches to business – and marketing – are all prominent in today's corporate environments. But they also reflect how thinking around business and marketing has evolved over the last century. Shifting from a production orientation (Ford Motor Co.) to a product orientation (Apple), a selling orientation (Amazon), a marketing orientation (Google), and now a societal marketing orientation (The Body Shop). All of these are examples of successful businesses that follow different marketing management orientations.
Brief
After you have completed the SWOT and PESTLE analysis for the Auckland based shoe shop - Sandy’s Shoe Box, prepare a brief summary of findings on some of the common strategies used by shoe companies with each of the various marketing mix tools: product, pricing, promotion and distribution.
Share your summary with your peers in the forum.
