The Marketing Mix - Simplified!

 

If you’ve learnt or tried to learn what marketing is, you would have definitely come across the marketing mix, more popularly known as the 4P's of marketing. Here, we present a simple way of understanding the concept through a little business story.

Imagine you won 5 crores in a lottery and out of your love for chewing gum, you decide to manufacture and market the same. The marketing mix forms a part of the marketing strategy of any kind of business – big or small.

Now let’s look at what the marketing mix for your business would look like.

Product: The reason your business exists is that you want to make profits by selling your product which is ‘Chewy Chewing Gum’.

Your chewing gum might have a lot of similarities or Points of Parity (POP) with that of your competitors like an attractive colour, flavour, non-stickiness etc.

Your product might have some unique benefits like a 3-hour flavour lock that differentiates it from your competitors’ products. This becomes a Point of Difference (POD) for your product.  

How well your product is received by consumers depends on how well it is differentiated from your competitors' products.

Price: This is the only P that fetches revenue for your business. You need to decide what should be the per-unit price for your gum.

You should also decide whether it needs to be priced at par with competition or above or below their price levels.

Promotion: This pillar talks about how you communicate your product’s benefits to the target consumers.

Advertising forms a major part of this pillar. Different forms of advertising – TV, Print, Social Media, billboards etc can be employed to promote Chewy chewing gum.

Special display, offers on product purchase etc are other types of promotion that usually happen at the point of sales (retail stores in this case).

Place:  This pillar talks about the channels through which you should sell your product. Do you wish to sell your chewing gum at local Kirana stores or through Hyper and Super Markets like Big Bazaar or Reliance Fresh?

The choice of place depends on your target consumers. Your consumers should find chewy chewing gum at a nearby store, when they rush to buy it after seeing your amazing ad.

We hope that you’ve understood the concept of the marketing mix through this simple example that we put forward. Apply it wherever necessary but do not force-fit it to devise a marketing strategy.

Happy Marketing!