Marketing mix
The marketing mix is the set of controllable marketing variables that the firm blends to produce the response it wants in the target market. The marketing mix consists of everything the firm can do to influence the demand for its product. The many possibilities can be collected into four groups of variables known as «4 P’s»: product, price, place, and promotion.
Product stands for the «goods-and-service» combination the company offers to the target market.
Price stands for the amount of money customers have to pay to obtain the product.
Place stands for company activities that make the product available to target consumers. A product reaches customers through a channel of distribution. A channel of distribution is any series of firms (or individuals) from producer to final user or consumer.
The channel of distribution can be:
short (it may run directly from a producer to a final user or consumer).
complex (involving many different kinds of middlemen and specialists.
And if a marketing manager has several different target markets, several channels of distribution might be needed.
Promotion stands for activities that communicate the merits of the product and persuade target customers to buy it.
Promotion includes: personal selling, mass selling, sales promotion.
It’s the marketing manager’s job to blend these methods.
1.Personal selling involves direct communication between sellers and potential customers. Personal selling is usually face-to-face, but sometimes communication is over the telephone. Personal selling lets the salesperson adapt the firm’s marketing mix to each potential customer. But this individual attention comes at a price. Personal selling can be very expensive. Often this personal effort has to be blended with mass selling and sales promotion.
2.Mass selling is communicating with large numbers of customers at the same time.
Mass selling embraces 2 main forms:
advertising (any paid form of nonpersonal presentation of ideas, goods, or services by an identified sponsor).
publicity (any unpaid form of nonpersonal presentation of ideas, goods, or services) is another important form of mass selling.
3.Sales promotion refers to those promotion activities—other than advertising, publicity, and personal selling—that stimulate interest, trial, or purchase by final customers or others in the channel. Sales promotion specialists try to help the personal selling and mass selling people.
Sales promotion can involve:
use of coupons,
point-of-purchase materials,
samples,
signs,
catalogs,
novelties,
circulars.
An effective marketing program blends all of the marketing mix elements into a coordinated program designed to achieve the company’s marketing objectives by delivering value to consumers.
The marketing mix constitutes the company’s tactical tool kit for establishing strong positioning in target markets. However, note that the four Ps represent the sellers’ view of the marketing tools available for influencing buyers. From a consumer viewpoint, each marketing tool is designed to deliver a customer benefit. One marketing expert suggests that companies should view the four Ps in terms of the customer’s four Cs:
