The Four Ps

The marketing mix is a tool used to help brands understand what elements must be combined in order to meet their marketing goals and objectives. Ultimately, this includes the 4 Ps of marketing: product, price, place and promotion.

The evolution of the digital age has caused the standard methods and practices of nearly every industry to change and grow to work within this new paradigm, and marketing is certainly no exception. In fact, the marketing industry has arguably seen the most benefit from the growth of digital.

Today's marketers have access to a wealth of information and access through new tools for customer profiling, artificial intelligence, and response analysis to name just a few. Add to that Big Data, or the ability to collect, analyze, and act on enormous amounts of customer and product information, and the idea of providing reliable, predictive one-to-one marketing becomes very real.

The core tenants of marketing have stood the test of time. The Internet age has caused some changes in the way that marketers work, meaning revising old marketing processes, concepts, and priorities, and then reconstructing them into forms that work better and more effectively in this new world of communications. But through it all, those tenants and fundamentals remain the same.

The 4 Ps of Marketing

The 4 Ps of marketing include product, price, place, and promotion. These are the key elements that must be united to effectively foster and promote a brand's unique value, and help it stand out from the competition.

But, what makes the 4 Ps of marketing so important that they have withstood the test of time, including the growth of the internet age? Below we break down each P, and reexamine the ways that each has remained critical to marketing.

Product

A product refers to any item that intends to satisfy the needs and wants of a target customer. It can be a tangible good, such a clothing item or piece of software, or intangible, like a service or experience (think legal services or a cruise).

Marketers must always have a clear concept of what their products stand for, and what differentiates them from the competition, before they can be marketed successfully. Today, the internet can be considered either the medium for purchase, via e-commerce, or the product itself, such as a social media service. Because of this, it's vital that marketers fully understand the product they are selling, how it meets the needs of their target customer, and what makes their product stand above the competition.

Some key questions that marketers need to answer include:

What do customers want from your product/service? Does it satisfy their needs?

What features of your product/service work to meet your customer's needs? Have you missed out on any features?

How and where will the customer use it?

How will the customers experience it?

Price

First comes the product, and immediately after comes a determination of its value among target audiences. Pricing strategy is an art and a science, in that it involves both market data and careful calculations, as well as skillfully balancing between pricing that is too high or too low, and understanding how skewing either way might damage the brand.

Price not only refers to the monetary value of a product, but also the time or effort the customer is willing to expend to acquire it. Determining this will be a critical factor in revenue for the brand as it will impact profit, supply, demand, and how much marketers should spend on a promotion or marketing strategy. This, in and of itself, is why this 'P' is one of the most important. If a product is priced too high or too low, the product - and brand - could fail.

Some key questions that marketers need to answer include:

What is the value of the product or service to the buyer?

How will your price compare to competitors?

Are there any possible established price points for the product/service in this area?

Place

The internet age has introduced new challenges when it comes to reaching your customers. Place refers to providing customers access to the product, and it also calls into play convenience for the customer. Marketing, through digital means or otherwise, is about putting the right product, in the right place, at the right price, at the right time, in front of the customer.

Some key questions that marketers need to answer include:

Where are target customers shopping?

Are they using desktops or mobile devices?

Are they shopping for similar products online, or in brick-and-mortar stores?

Where are they engaging on social media?

Even though transactions with your company may take place exclusively in-store or online, customers likely interact with your brand or your specific products in a variety of places. It's important to consider how each of these places influences the overall customer experience.

Promotion

Now, how to make an audience aware of the product? Within the framework of the four Ps, promotion refers primarily to marketing communications.

These communications use channels such as public relations, advertising, direct marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, or sales promotions; think of it as any way marketers disseminate relevant product information to their target customers.

Promotion is the area that has arguably seen the greatest growth and change as a result of the digital age. With the exceptional access offered by B2C marketing solutions, marketers can now promote products easier, more effectively, and with more personalization than ever before, thus leading to greater outcomes and ever-increasing expectations.

Some key questions that marketers need to answer include:

How will you reach your target audience?

Where will you send your marketing messages to your target audience?

How does your competition promote their product? Does that influence your own promotional activity?

When is the best time to promote?

Using the 4 Ps of Marketing

The four elements of the marketing mix can be used to help you decide how to take a new offer to market or can be leveraged to help test your current marketing strategy. Follow these steps to define or improve your marketing mix:

1.Identify the product or service you want to analyze.

2.Review and answer the 4Ps questions listed above.

3.Once you define your ideal marketing mix, try testing the overall offer from a customer's perspective. Here are some questions that can guide you:

1.Does it satisfy their needs?

2.Will they consider the price to be reasonable?

3.Where will they find this product/service?

4.Has your audience been targeted appropriately and reached by your marketing communications?

4.Continue to optimize your marketing mix by asking questions and making changes.

5.Review your marketing mix on a regular basis to adapt to the constantly evolving market.

Updating The Four Ps

McCarthy classified various marketing activities into marketing-mix tools of four broad kinds, which he called the four Ps of marketing: product, price, place, and promotion.55 The marketing variables under each P are shown in Figure 1.4.

Given the breadth, complexity, and richness of marketing, howeveras exemplified by holistic marketingclearly these four Ps are not the whole story anymore. If we update them to reflect the holistic marketing concept, we arrive at a more representative set that encompasses modern marketing realities: people, processes, programs, and performance, as in Figure 1.5.

Peoplereflects, in part, internal marketing and the fact that employees are critical to marketing success. Marketing will only be as good as the people inside the organization. It also reflects the fact that marketers must view consumers as people to understand their lives more broadly, and not just as they shop for and consume products and services.

Processesreflects all the creativity, discipline, and structure brought to marketing management. Marketers must avoid ad hoc planning and decision making and ensure that state-of-the-art marketing ideas and concepts play an appropriate role in all they do. Only by instituting the right set of processes to guide activities and programs can a firm engage in mutually beneficial long-term relationships. Another important set of processes guides the firm in imaginatively generating insights and breakthrough products, services, and marketing activities.

Programsreflects all the firm's consumer-directed activities. It encompasses the old four Ps as well as a range of other marketing activities that might not fit as neatly into the old view of marketing. Regardless of whether they are online or offline, traditional or nontraditional, these activities must be integrated such that their whole is greater than the sum of their parts and they accomplish multiple objectives for the firm.

We defineperformanceas in holistic marketing, to capture the range of possible outcome measures that have financial and nonfinancial implications (profitability as well as brand and customer equity), and implications beyond the company itself (social responsibility, legal, ethical, and community related). Finally, these new four Ps actually apply to all disciplines within the company, and by thinking this way, managers grow more closely aligned with the rest of the company.

Assessment Task No. 3

• Instructions

Instructions

Directions: Explain the given question, before you begin writing, read the words carefully and plan what you will say. Your essay should ne as well organized and as carefully written as you can make it. Avoid copying from any recources, use your own words.

1. Write a brief note on the updated four Ps.

The Eight Marketing Management Tasks

With holistic marketing as a backup we can identify a specific set of tasks that make up successful marketing leadership. Some of the essential marketing management tasks are being:

1. Developing Marketing Strategies and Plans: The first task is to identify the organization long-run opportunities given its market experience and core competences.
2. Capturing Marketing Insights: Marketers must closely monitor the marketing environment to continually asses market potential and forecast demand.
3. Connecting with the Customers: The firm must determine how to best create value for its chosen target markets and develop strong, profitable, long-term relationship with customers.
4. Building Strong Brands: Marketers need to understand how customers perceive their brands strengths and weakness.
5. Shaping the Market Offerings: At the heart of the marketing program is the product, the firm tangible offering to the market, features, and packaging.
6. Delivering Value: How can the firm deliver value to its target market? Channel activities are need to make the product offering accessible and available to customers.
7. Communicating Value: Marketers must adequately communicate to the target market the value embodied by their products and services.
8. Creating Successful Long-term Growth: The marketing strategy should take into account changing global opportunities and challenges.

It is apparent that Marketing management tasks as an alternative to the selling concept as the way business firms fundamentally approach the market. The guideline theme for marketing practice under the selling concept insists that given enough selling and advertising, customers can be convinced to by the product.

Assessment Task No. 4

• Instructions

Instructions

Directions: Explain the question, before you begin writing, read the words carefully and plan what you will say. Your essay should ne as well organized and as carefully written as you can make it. Avoid copying from any recources, use your own words.

1. List and describe each marketing management tasks.