Once you have a well-defined positioning strategy and a clearer image of our future brand, you can go to the next step and start building a set of marketing tactics that can help us give life to the Brand Story that you crafted earlier. It is time to learn how to use marketing mix concept to build a successfully marketing strategy.
Table of Contents
At this point you will introduce the Marketing Mix concept, first introduced in 1948, by Harvard professor James Culliton, in an article called “The management of marketing costs” in which he describes marketers as “mixers of ingredients”.
What is Marketing Mix?
The Marketing Mix was introduced as being the set of activities that cover 4Ps business pillars: Price, People, Promotion, and Placement. This was the reason why the initial concept was called the 4 Ps of Marketing and was popularized by Philip Kotler.
These days, markers are talking about the 7 P’s of Marketing, but you will cover the initial 4, which if used correctly can give you a competitive advantage right from the start. After that, you can study and implement the rest of them, to perfect your marketing approach.
1. Product
Refers to the goods or services that your company offers. It takes into consideration the customer needs, the competitors offerings, and the CTQ and Delights that your customers expect. These CTQ and Delights will be translated into the features that your product will have.
2. Price
Refers to the amount of money your future customers will pay when they want to purchase your product. The pricing strategy can be influenced by factors such as market demand, competitor’s prices, production costs, and value proposition.
3. Promotion
Involves the various marketing activities used by a company to create awareness, generate interest, and persuade customers to purchase its products or services. Promotion includes advertising, public relations, sales promotions, personal selling, and direct marketing.
4. Place
Refers to the distribution channels and strategies used by a company to make its products or services available to customers. It involves decisions related to the selection and management of retail stores, online platforms, wholesalers, and other intermediaries.
These four elements of the marketing mix are interdependent and need to be carefully coordinated to effectively reach the target market, satisfy customer expectations, and for achieving marketing objectives, and assure product accessibility.
*** We will address every of the above “4 P’s of Marketing” in the next 4 articles. We will do that because every one of them is very important in developing a Marketing Strategy, and we need to cover all the important steps.
Why do you need to know How to use marketing mix concept?
The marketing mix is the set of tactics that you can use to give life to your brand strategy. The marketing strategy needs to be built in such a way that can help you bring your Brand strategy to life.
Further, your brand strategy needs to help you make the positioning strategy clear, in the mind of your consumers. Which further will help you own the open spot on the brand lather, in your product category.
A Marketing Mix will be a sure way for consistency and coherence across all of your messages and all of your communication channels. It will help you put together an integrated marketing strategy.
How can you use Marketing Mix in formulating a Marketing Strategy?
The marketing mix is crucial in the formulation of a marketing strategy for several reasons:
1. Consistency and coherence
I will argue that the most important aspect of building an Marketing Strategy, using the 4Ps, is the fact that you will have in your communication efforts consistency and coherence. These will bring clarity intern, besides the members of your team and your employees. At the same time, your clients will have clarity as well, not being confused by mixed messages or conflicting communication channels. It ensures that the product, price, promotion, and place work together to convey a clear and unified message to the target market, enhancing brand image and customer perception. Further straitening the positioning of your brand, in the mind of your prospect.
2. Competitive advantage
For long-term business success to be achieved, companies must find a relevant differentiator, and make efforts to build a barrier to protect that competitive advantage. The marketing mix enables companies to communicate to their customers the differentiator of their business. All the 4 P’s of Marketing will help you position the product or service in a way that highlights its distinctive features, benefits, and advantages over competitors, thereby gaining a competitive edge in the market.
3. Resource allocation
The marketing mix will help you be more efficient in the process of allocation the resources for your business. It will provide you with a framework for decision-making that will allow you to prioritize your efforts and allocate budgets, personnel, and other resources based on the importance and impact of each element of the marketing mix.
4. Flexibility and adaptability
Having a set of data on which you made your theories, which further played an essential role in formulating the marketing strategy, can allow you to make real time adjustments to reach your objectives. You will gather data by trial and error, and by monitoring market conditions. In this way, you can take each of the 4P’s and test them, one by one, to understand the impact that it can have.
When should you create a Marketing Mix?
A marketing mix should be created during the planning phase of a marketing strategy or campaign. It is typically developed before implementing any marketing activities, but after you have built a Brand Strategy.
Usually, you will need to create a marketing mix at least in the following instances:
1. New product or service launch
When you are introducing a new product to the market, it is crucial to develop an effective marketing mix. This can make or break your go-to-market strategy. Also, it will help you determine what futures your product should have, what pricing strategy to use, what will be your distribution channels and what types of promotions should you do.
2. Market expansion or entry into new markets
If you are planning to launch a new company, or you want to enter new markets. Also, is important to do this activity when you are trying to acquire new market segments, unserved by your company until that point. It will be important for the success of your initiative to tailor your marketing approach to each customer segment. You can read more about How to do a customer segmentation analysis in the attached link.
3. Rebranding or brand refresh
If you need to rebrand your product or company, you need to make this process from start to finish. It will be useful to align the product, pricing, promotion, and distribution decisions with the new brand positioning and identity.
4. Annual marketing planning
If you want to stay ahead, you will need a carefully planned, and periodically revised, Marketing Plan. Most companies do this planning once a year. At this planning session, it is recommended to stress test your assumptions, made one year before. See if you learned anything new about your clients, competitors, or market condition in general. If you did, it is a good opportunity to revise your 4Ps and adapt your strategy.
Conclusion
Take your time and understand how the marketing mix can influence your success and how things must be interconnected for your communication to be clear. If you want to make the lives of your clients simple and not leave any chance for confusion, you need consistency and coherence throughout your communication channels and messages. All the marketing signals should be aligned to support your Brand Positioning strategy.
Additional Resources for learning how to use marketing mix
For further deep dive, I would recommend you to read Marketing Management by Philip Kotler , Kevin Lane Keller , Alexander Chernev .
