The 4 P’s of Marketing Are:
- Product
- Price
- Promotion
- Place
Marketing is based on four P’s: Product, Price, Promotion, and Place. They represent the key factors for the marketing of an item. These four key elements are the basis of a successful marketing strategy to market your brand. These tools aim at helping marketers think through all aspects of products and services and help them decide how they should market them.
These tools are named the marketing mix. New marketers recommend expanding the 4 ps of marketing to include services too. The model of the four P’s can be used when you’re planning a new business venture, evaluating an existing offer, or trying to optimize your sales with your target audience.
Putting your marketing into focusing on the four P’s is an easy way to understand what your competitors want to achieve. This Stephen-Twomey, and I’m Kennected’s Chief Technology Officer and Chief Marketing Officer. This guide provides information for identifying the best product, pricing, place, and promotion of your business products.
What's The Marketing Mix?
Before a brand can dive into all the subcategories of marketing, such as digital marketing, email marketing, and so on, their marketing team needs to understand basic marketing concepts, including the 4 ps of marketing.
The four Ps of marketing are commonly referred to as the marketing mix. In a marketing strategy, there are four key components: product, pricing, place, and promotion. This element is responsible for defining, describing the product, or brand positioning.
The marketing mix addresses factors such as understanding the needs or desires of consumers, identifying the cause of the failure of the current product offering, and finding ways to solve said problems. A marketing strategy involves identifying the right target market and using tools such as advertising to penetrate the said market.
To develop an effective marketing mix, you should consider what is best to stand apart from the competition. After a cost-benefit analysis, distribution channels such as outsourcing or company transport fleets are decided.
Understanding your client’s business, competitors, and customers makes the marketing strategy incredibly useful. You will determine what products are best marketed and how to promote them. However, the process of starting can be complicated.
Product Example | Marketing Strategy
We’ll use Marketing Hub as an example. It’s a marketing automation tool for attracting the right audience.
Marketing companies are struggling to manage too much data with unreliable and expensive software solutions to make work more challenging rather than easier. Marketing Hub provides specialized tools to manage your social media, email marketing, and advertising campaigns on your mobile or desktop.
Promotion Example
Let’s become the market leaders! We want to help people grow their careers and grow their businesses too. Inbound marketing is focused mainly on organic acquisitions. Marketing Hub is promoted by a variety of means.
Place Example
Our SaaS solution offers a marketing center directly on the website. Marketers can join KennectedReach directly via our site. It has been made easy to sign-up on the website for demonstrations.
Understanding How To Position Your Market Offering
Marketers need to put products in the right place to be at the right prices and at the right time. That seems easy. You have to create products that people want, put them into a market somewhere that those same people frequent, and charge it to match that value they see it getting.
To accomplish that effectively though, there must be a great deal of research involved: Identify where customers buy the goods. The next step should be to determine the best way to obtain the product at an appropriate value and make it all unified during this difficult time.
The Law of 29
The law of 29 is a strategic marketing concept that holds a potential customer needs to be exposed to a good or service 29 times before they’ll buy.
Understanding The Four P's Inside of Marketing Strategy
Neil Borden popularized the idea for the marketing mix—and the concepts eventually known as the 4Ps—in the 1950s. Marketing mixes are the ingredients that combine to capture and promote a brand or product’s unique selling points, those that differentiate it from its competitors.
Borden was an advertising professor at Harvard. His 1964 paper “The Concept Of The Marketing Mix” explained how businesses use advertising techniques to reach consumers. The knowledge helped marketing teams account for the physical barriers that prevent widespread product adoption.
The concepts that Borden popularized continue to serve the marketing purpose of businesses. Borden was successful in business when his idea came into existence and was developed by other key players in many years.
E. Jerome McCarthy, a marketing professor at Michigan State University, refined the concepts in Borden’s book and created the idea of the four Ps of marketing. McCarthy’s book was titled “Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach.” The marketing mix concept is just as valid today.
The best marketing strategy is unknown. There may not be a simple answer because marketing in the digital age is immensely complex. Beyond traditional print advertising and broadcast commercials, the Internet has added many tools to a marketer’s toolbox.
Developing loyal customers who praise your product or services — and giving them the means to spread their experiences with your company — can be an incredibly powerful word-of-mouth value for your company.
Product
The first “P” is product. Your brand has developed a product or service that solves a problem or need of a consumer. A product or service is something offered to a customer. The marketing product should be designed to satisfy current demand from consumers.
Your product may be anything sold for profit, whether that means a physical good or a service. It can also be defined as a bundle of utilities that comes with physical aspects such as design, volume, brand name, etc.
How does your marketing product meet your customer’s needs?
Whether you sell customer pallets and wood products or provide luxury accommodations, you must have a clear grasp of exactly what your product is and what makes it unique before you can successfully market it.
The type of product impacts its perceived value, which allows companies to price it profitably. The idea is that the product or service is compelling enough to convince the customer to buy, creating demand. Marketing needs an understanding of the life cycle of an item, and the company’s business leaders have a strategy to deal with products throughout their entire life cycle.
The product or service life cycle defines the stages that a product moves through in the marketplace as it enters, becomes established, and exits the marketplace. The type of product also partly determines the costs of it, and the way the company should market it on their site. Some of the best-selling products are the best in the industry.
Price
The second of our four Ps is price. Price represents what consumers pay for an item. The marketer must also consider supply cost, and seasonal discounts concerning the price of a certain product. The second “P” is based not only on the fair monetary value of the item/service, but must also consider the overall supply costs, what prices other brands are selling it at, and more.
Price usually reflects the product’s perceived value rather than its real value. This means that pricing can be increased to promote exclusivity or reduced to create access.
How will your price compare with your competitors?
Guerilla marketing refers to an advertising strategy that focuses on using low-cost marketing techniques to generate maximum exposure for a product or Omni-channel. Omni-channel refers to a sales approach that uses multiple channels to provide customers with an excellent shopping experience. The price of a product directly influences sales volume and, consequently, business profits.
In some cases, companies will increase the prices for products that appear luxurious. Alternatively, they could raise prices to make it easier for customers to test it. Similar (in concept) products and brands may need to be positioned differently based on varying price points, while price elasticity considerations may influence our next two P’s. Marketers must decide if customers should take discounts.
A discount might attract a larger number of customers and make the product seem less exclusive or less luxurious compared to a price increase. Price determinations will impact profit margins, supply, demand, and strategy.
Place
Where do potential buyers look for your particular product or service?
Place refers to the geographical area where a product or service is shipped or made available. Often you will hear marketers saying that marketing is about putting the right product, at the right price, at the right place, at the right time.
The overall goal of any marketing effort is to get consumers to see your product, so your team must know where they’ll be selling the product. When companies decide on their place, they determine how to sell the product in the marketplace.
The aim for all entrepreneurs is a product that will attract customers that will likely be buying it. This can also mean putting products in certain stores or placing items in certain stores. If your target market is seniors, it won’t make sense to market on TikTok. Think about possible distribution channels and outlets you could use to sell your product.
Today, even in situations where the actual transaction doesn’t happen on the web, the initial place potential clients are engaged and converted is online. In some situations, placement refers to introducing an advertisement in television series films on websites to market the product. GoldenEye was the 17th Bond film of its kind in 1995.
Promotion
How do your customers find out about you? What strategies do you use, and are they effective? It sounds simple, and it is. The fourth “P” of marketing is promotion. When you’ve got a product and price, it’s time to promote it. Promotion includes elements like advertising, public relations, social media marketing, marketing via email, search engine marketing, video marketing, and more.
Promotion includes online factors such as determining the class of search functions on Google that may trigger corresponding or targeted ads for the product, the design, and the layout of a company’s webpage. Promotion of products can tell a consumer why the product should cost them a particular amount. Marketers typically link marketing and placement elements for a more targeted audience. The place is an important factor in promoting an item online and offline.
In 1980, Absolut sold only 10,000 cases of vodka. Twenty years later, the company sold over four million cases of vodka. The product is displayed in a social or online store.
How Do You Use The Four Ps Of Marketing?
The model of the four P’s is applicable when it comes to developing and managing a business idea, evaluating, and optimizing sales for your target customers. It can even help to test out an existing marketing plan.
Marketing To Your Target Market With The 4 P's of Marketing
Whether dealing with a startup or an established company, balancing these four elements is critical to marketers working hard to position a particular product or brand in the marketplace. Marketing mixes often refer to products, prices, places, and promotions.
The P’s in marketing revolves around three extensions: people, process, and physical evidence. This is why the Promise/Paint/Proof/Push framework works so well for marketing emails. It is the most crucial element involved in advertising the goods and services it sells and interacts with each other. All these things can help you develop a holistic marketing plan.
You can apply the marketing mix concepts to create winning marketing strategies that help you profitably launch and promote your company’s products. We hope this quick overview of the 4 ps of marketing provides insight into a critical aspect of successfully taking a product or service to market.
