The 4Ps Of Marketing Mix

  • Anna
  • 05th Aug, 2022
4ps of marketing mix

Marketing is the action or business to promote and sell products or services, including market research and advertising. For a business to succeed, marketing has a significant role in it. No matter how good your product is or even if it is cheaper than any other competition, you will never succeed if you do not market it correctly. While marketing, you should know your customers, where to find potential customers, their price preferences, and understand your product/ service. Therefore to do effective marketing and be among the successful marketers, companies have made a model called the 4Ps of the marketing mix; product, price, place, and promotion.

These four factors are among the core factors that affect marketing. Different external and internal factors also constrain these four Ps of the marketing mix in the business environment.

They are related to each another, so change in one affects the other another. Therefore, businesses must understand these factors defining marketing mix carefully. These four factors are used by companies so that they can identify the key factors for their business. We can find out what customers want, how our service or product meets or fails to meet their needs, how the product or service is perceived, how the interaction is, and how they stand out from the competition.

Although you normally hear the term "Marketing Mix" for traditional marketing, you can also apply the same concepts to digital marketing and Social Media Marketing. That said, there will be small changes in the structure of Place and Promotion.

History

marketing mix

The concept of the four Ps of marketing has been around since the early 1950s, which is still prevalent because it has helped businesses understand the market and customers better to know what to make and how to make it. Neil Borden was the one who popularized the concept of the 4Ps of marketing mixes; he was an advertising professor at Harvard University. His ideas have been influential and have been refined over these years. Now let's dive deep into how the 4Ps of marketing work.

Following is the marketing mix, explained!

Product

Product is the service or good a company offers to its customers, and they should make something that would fulfill the existing consumer demand. If not, it should be compelling enough to make the consumers have the feeling to get it. Marketers need to understand the complete life cycle of their product. Along with that business, executives should have a plan to deal with the products. The product type helps to determine the charge, promote it and place it. You will attract more customers if you become the first in the segment or do something completely different. We can take the example of companies like Tesla and Apple regarding marketing products.

Price

price of marketing pix 4ps of marketing

Product Pricing plays a big role in any marketing campaign, be it physical marketing, digital marketing, or social media marketing. Therefore, marketers must link the price to the perceived value, considering supply costs, competitor prices, and seasonal discounts. However, sometimes you can raise the price to make it feel like a luxurious product. While doing so, marketers should know when to do so because sometimes fewer prices attract more customers, and at other times it can make the product less qualitative. Be very careful while determining the prices of your products. In this case, we can take the example of UNIQLO.

Place

When a company finds a place to sell its product or service, they determine where to sell the product and how to deliver it. Their goal is always to get their product to a place where there are customers who would purchase the product or use the service. Sometimes it is about finding a place, store, channel, or newspaper. If you are selling sports products, or if you have your store near a university or an educational institution, you are more likely to get more sales. But if you open the same store near an old age home with fewer active people, you will not sell much of your products. Similarly, ads for the latest electronic device on a religious channel that mostly old people view will not be effective. Therefore companies need to determine the place to sell their product and advertise.

The place is a physical location in traditional forms of marketing, but when it comes to digital marketing and social media marketing, the concept changes slightly. Here, the place in digital marketing and social media marketing refers to the marketing platform.

Promotion

4ps of marketing

Promotion includes promotional strategy, public relations, and physical or digital media advertising. Product promotion helps the targeted audience know about the product they purchase, its qualities, and the prices. How you promote will affect the sales or usage of your product, which we can see from the progress of Absolut, a Swedish vodka brand. It only sold around 10,000 cases of its vodka in 1980, but after it started its iconic advertising campaign, it sold 4.5 million cases by 2000. The unique styled bottling and the advertising they did in every place they could help them become the longest-running continuous ad campaign/ marketing campaigns of all time, from 1981 to 2005.

But just running campaigns is not enough; you will need to learn marketing strategies tailor-made for your targeted audience and decent campaign management skills.

Conclusion

Although the 4ps of marketing is a rather old concept, the aspects of the product, price, place, and promotion remain the same. Understanding the 4ps of marketing and using appropriate marketing strategy along with management skills on your marketing product, you can market your product to your targeted audience extremely well. Having some decent skills in data analytics and a good knowledge of defining the marketing mix will help you along the way as well.

If you do this well, you might even be among the short list of successful marketers.

We hope you found this interesting. And as always, thank you for reading till the end.