Modern Marketing

Almost every company on the planet sets out with the main objective of making money. This is generally done by manufacturing some form of product, or offering a service, and then charging customers money for it. This fundamental theory is fairly straight-forward, although it contains many specific details.

Firstly, it is a very rare case that a business can offer a product or service that is truly unique and cannot be provided by anyone else. This means that your enterprise will be competing with other businesses that sell a similar item and you will both be trying to earn money from the same shoppers, who only want to spend their money once.

Marketing is the primary tool used by modern businesses to draw potential customers to do business with them and not with their rivals. It is a very extensive topic that is influenced by a great number of internal and external variables, but when done right it can be the single business practice that can make or break a company.

So where should you start when constructing a marketing strategy for your own business? Well, each situation is different, and each industry will have its own set of advantages and weaknesses that must be taken into consideration, but there is a marketing rule that can be applied to almost any company to be used as a marketing framework.

The Marketing Mix

The marketing mix was a phrase that was first coined in the 1950′s and is an expression that is used to express the fundamental building blocks of any marketing system. It demonstrates the fact that marketing is not a straightforward, blunt-edged business tool, but rather a subtle balance of different elements of business operations. It got its name because it is similar to the ingredients list for a recipe.

The term was later developed to include the idea of “four P’s” that described the essential elements of the marketing mix. The formalisation of these P’s made it very clear for business managers and marketers to swiftly relate the elements of marketing to the strengths of their own companies, and by doing so could very quickly create a tailored and effective marketing system. The four P’s are; Product, Price, Place and Promotion.

Marketing is a worldwide business idea which may get carried out on advertising and promotional balloons as well as almost any amount of different products and services.

Product

Although every element of the marketing mix is a requirement, the “product” element mentioned as one of the four P’s is perhaps the most crucial of all. It identifies the physical product or intangible service that your company will be selling, and at the end of the day it is the reason that customers are going to spend money with you. If this element is not adequately managed then your company will find it hard to survive.

Many people do not think that marketing has any role to play when it comes to the actual product that your company is selling. In fact, the common train of thought very often bears the exact opposite sentiment. Surely it should be the other way around – your production department creates a product for sale and then it is the job of the marketing department to discover ways to sell it, right?

Consider the computer software market as an example. There are many established brands of both operating system as well as software application products in the marketplace already, and since the market is relatively well saturated it would be incredibly tough (and expensive) to “take on the big boys”. So how can the principles of the marketing mix help in this situation?

Rather than developing an operating system and then attempting to craft a marketing strategy to rival the likes of Microsoft and Apple, it would be far more effective to look at what types of product are desired in the current marketplace, and how feasible it would be to manufacture and sell them.

Once your products have been fashioned and created it is still a vital skill to be able to objectively evaluate your own products to identify the reasons that a customer would buy your product rather than a competitors’. The skill is called product differentiation and is one of the fundamental skills of the product part of the marketing mix pie.

Another form of this part of the marketing mix is called product variation and is generally used to either extend the lifecycle of a product already in the market, or to make your new product attractive to as many consumers as possible. Once again, this technique can be applied at all stages of product development.

The motor industry uses this approach very effectively by offering different engines, trim packages and interior options with the cars that they offer. They use the marketing mix to good effect to sell their own products in an incredibly competitive marketplace.

It might seem obvious that marketing is vitally important to any balloon wholesaler such as ourselves, although the suggestions still must be put into practice, which isn’t always easy.

Price

Another key factor in the marketing mix relates to the price of your products or services. This isn’t a simple case of performing market research to determine the highest price that your customers would spend (although that can be a handy tool to use), but rather making use of the price of your products as a strategic weapon designed to achieve any particular objectives your company has. The potential benefits of an effective pricing plan are surprisingly large!

Although it may seem obvious, it’s still worth noting that price has always been, and likely always will be, one of the crucial factors that customers take into account when they are making a purchase. It is also worth noting that customers don’t always consider the cheapest price to be the best price. In fact a price that is too low can sometimes turn customers away.
There are many questions that you need to ask yourself when devising a good pricing strategy, key amongst which are the price sensitivity of your customers, what your competitors are doing and how can pricing boost your own profits. From a strategy point of view though, pricing can be covered by two main principals; price skimming and also penetration pricing.

Price skimming

The principal idea driving price skimming is to make as much cash as possible from the segment of the market which is price-insensitive and are going to be willing to spend a premium amount of money to get a product or service early on. Not only can this approach yield great financial benefits, but it can also promote an exclusive and high quality image of your item.

This pricing technique is frequently used in the consumer electronics market where customers will often eagerly await the release of a new mobile phone or computer games console. Manufacturers could set nearly any price they wanted to and there would still be a loyal core of customers that would pay it.

Penetration pricing

Penetration pricing is at the other end of the pricing spectrum, and is tailored towards gaining a large market share at a short-term cost so that financial benefits can be made long into the future. It can be a risky strategy, but when employed correctly it can create revenue streams for many years to come.

Another thing to keep in mind is that “price” is the only part of the marketing mix that will generate earnings for a business. The other members of the four P’s will all cost money to produce or carry out. So it is even more vital to get your pricing strategy right.

Before our corporation began studying on-line promotion hand wavers didn’t seem to be the clear choice of keyword to use as our primary target.

Place

Place is the part of the marketing mix that is often overlooked by companies, but it’s still a significant part of selling your product successfully. In a nutshell, it describes the way in which you deliver your product to your consumer, and subsequently how you receive money from them.

The most common implications of place-based marketing are the physical locations in which your goods are sold. For the vast majority of consumer products, this involves the distribution network between your manufacturing centres and retailers and other outlets around the world. Since distribution of a physical product costs money it is crucial to determine your own priorities and modify your distribution network accordingly.

With the growing use of the Internet by your potential customers, marketing strategies have had to take into account how they use the Internet to help deliver their products. By using the Internet as a place of contact (or even as an entire distribution route in download-based markets such as MP3s) companies are now able to reach out to a huge pool of potential customers. Effective positioning of your product or service can therefore deliver impressive financial results.

Promotion

When you say the word “marketing”, most people immediately think of the promotional side of the marketing mix, although as we have seen, this is only one branch of a more complete system. Promotion can be employed on a very individual basis or as a mass communication instrument, and whilst it may be a costly undertaking it is often an important one.

Advertising is one of the most typical forms of promotion. Typically it would be done by posting on billboards, creating short clips for TV and radio or by physically handing out flyers or leaflets to potential buyers. With the coming of the information age we have seen a great increase in promotion via e-mail and the Internet, or simply as targeted advertising materials posted through your front door.

Another important part of promotion involves branding, which will not necessarily yield more sales directly, but relates back to one of the preliminary purposes of marketing; getting customers to choose your product over those of your rivals.

Putting it into Practice

As previously mentioned each business is different and will have different marketing requirements. By using a mixture of the four P’s reviewed above you can take a good view of your own marketing plan.