The Marketing Mix

As we said yesterday, before building a company, you should build well-based foundations so that your company/es don't collapse. That is the main characteristic of the Marketing Mix.


As a rule, the marketing mix gets divided into four sections or P, the well-kown Four P: product, price, placement and promotion.

Product
You have to think about what do you want to offer, how are you going to design it, the packaging of the product, your strategical corporate and product branding, the development of your product... This P is the one that most things englobes, and it is one of the most important ones (in terms of creating your company). There some more reasons to take in mind:

• Name of the brand
• Functionality of the product: is it going to be useful?
• Style
• Quality
  
• Security: do you have to adapt security measures for children?
• Packaging: the design of your product depende on the image you want to give, for example: if you want to create a serious image, your corporate identity could be black and gold, like the Lays Gourmet, etc.
• Technical and Customer Support
• Guarantee/Warranty
• Services and accesories

Who is your product aimed to? Which is your target going to be?
Will it be a good inversion? Will you obtain a good benefit from it?
How do you plan to position it (we will treat this on a near future)
Which is your diferential advantadge? Your value proposition?
(we will also work with this soon)

Price
Now you've got your product, you have to think about the charge for it. There are several things to take in mind:

• Price strategies: depending on the target you want to reach, your price would be cheaper or more extensive, depending on the level/category of society you would like to associate your product to. Some strategies are competition pricing, product-line pricing, psychological pricing and premium pricing.
• Discounts, promotional offers,
• Sales
• Price for seasons
• Price flexibility: special rates...

On the whole, you have to take in mind the costs of producing, distributing and promoting, which means that everything you do will cost something.

Place
It develops the politic of where a product/office is going to be located and how can a customer get there. You have to take in mind:

• How are you going to distribute it?
  
• Which is your logistic strategy going to be?
• Channels of distribution
• Market share
• Special and exclusive members (VIP)

If a customer cannot get to your product in an easy way, your product might not sell as much as it could, so you have to care a lot about the placement of it.

Promotion
This is a fundamental part while developing the marketing mix. If people don't know about your product, there will be no customers. They have to know your product, at least have heard of it. And well, how are you going to let your customers know about your product?

• Developing a promotional strategy
• Advertising
• Personal selling and sales force
• Public relations and publicity
• Merchandising
• Strategic Communication
• Direct Marketing
• Mailing
• Etc.

There are a wide range of possibilities for promoting your product or service, it depends on you to choose whether you prefer one or another.


Now we know how the marketing mix goes, it's time to develop the customer-side marketing, a similar strategic planning, but from the view of customers.