MARKETING MIX

Marketing is the term given to the different activities involved in distributing goods from the manufacturer to the final customer. It means two things. First, it is a strategy and set of techniques to sell an organization’s products or services. This involves choosing target customers and designing a persuasive marketing mix to get them to buy. The mix may include a range of brands, tempting prices convenient sales outlets and a battery of advertising and promotions. The combination of different elements of a company’s marketing plan is known as the marketing mix, that comprises the 4 Ps: products (goods), price, place, promotion. The four Ps are a useful summary of the marketing mix, the activities that you have to combine successfully in order to sell. Let's look at these activities in detail.

1.Products (Goods) can refer to the materials and components used to make products, or the products that are made. Here are some examples of these different types of goods:

Consumer goods that last a long time, such as cars and washing machines,
are consumer durables. Consumer goods such as food products that sell quickly are fast-moving consumer goods, or FMCG. A brand is a name a company gives to its products so they can be easily recognized. This may be the name of the company itself. For products like cars, you refer to the make and the model, the particular type of car, for example, the Ford (make) Ka (model).

Brand awareness or brand recognition is how much people recognize a brand. The ideas people have about a brand is its brand image. Many companies have a brand manager who is in charge of creating brands and keeping them in customer's minds through advertising, packaging, etc. A brand should have a clear brand identity so that people think of it in a particular way in relation to other brands.

A product with the retailer’s own name on it is an own-brand product
(BrE) or own-label product (AmE). Products that are not branded, those that do not have a brand name, are generic products or generics.

2. Promotion includes all the activities aimed to increase the demand for a product. Sales promotion denotes the work of selling a product by all useful methods such as: powerful advertising; personal persuasion of possible customers by visit, phone or letter; exhibitions, displays and demonstrations; competitions for prizes; free samples; trading stamps, etc.

Advertising is an important element of the marketing function. It is used to increase sales by making the product or service known to a wider audience, and by emphasizing its superior qualities. A company can advertise in a variety of ways, depending on how much it wishes to spend, and the size and type of the target audience. The different media for advertising include television, radio, newspapers, magazines and direct mail, by which advertisers send letters, brochures and leaflets directly to potential customers.

Advertising is a highly developed business. In the UK, for example,
approximately £5 billion is spent on advertising each year.

3. Pricing is an important stage of marketing. Products, for example skis, exist in different models. Some are basic, some more sophisticated. The cheapest skis are low-end or bottom-end. The most expensive ones are high-end or top-end products, designed for experienced users (or people with a lot of money!).The cheapest entry-level skis are for beginners who have never bought skis before. Those in between are mid-range. If you buy sophisticated skis to replace basic ones, you trade up and move upmarket. If you buy cheaper skis after buying more expensive ones, you trade down and move downmarket.

Downmarket can show disapproval. If a publisher takes a newspaper downmarket, they make it more popular, but less cultural, to increase sales.

Mass market describes goods that sell in large quantities and the people who buy them. For example, family cars are a mass market product. A niche or niche market is a small group of buyers with special needs, which may be profitable to sell to. For example, sports cars are a niche in the car industry.

4. Place. After manufacturers produce finished goods from raw materials or from components they usually sell them in bulk to a wholesaler. The wholesaler supplies the goods to many different retailers and then the retailers sell them to individual customers.

People buy things in a shop (BrE) or store (AmE). Companies may call
it a retail outlet or sales outlet. There are a lot of different types of shops: chain stores, department stores, hypermarkets, etc. In Britain a shopping centre or shopping precinct is a purpose-built area of building in a town centre with a number of shops. Outside towns, there are shopping malls, where it is easy to park.

A fifth P which is sometimes added is packaging: all the materials used to protect and present a product before it is sold.

This first concept of marketing as selling and persuasion is by far the most popular idea among both managers and the public.

The second, and by far more important concept of marketing, focuses on improving the reality of what is on offer. It is based on understanding customers’ needs and developing new solutions which are better than those currently available. Doing this is not a marketing department problem, but one which involves the whole organization.

Creating company-wide focus on the customer requires the continual
acquisition of new skills and technology. Marketing is rarely effective as a business function. As the chief executive of Hewlett Packard put it "Marketing is too important to leave to the marketing department". Such companies understand that everybody’s task is marketing. This concept of marketing offering real customer value is what business is all about.

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