Marketing mix

The marketing mix was first developed by McCarthy over 40 years ago. It was designed to suggest that you have a balance mix of marketing in your marketing plan.

Elements of the marketing mix - the 4 Ps

Product

Defining the characteristics of your product or service to meet the customers' needs.

Price

Deciding on a pricing strategy. Even if you decide not to charge for a service, it is useful to realise that this is still a pricing strategy. Identifying the total cost to the user (which is likely to be higher than the charge you make) is a part of the price element.

Promotion

This includes advertising, personal selling (eg attending exhibitions), sales promotions (eg special offers), and atmospherics (creating the right impression through the working environment). Public Relations is included within Promotion by many marketing people (though PR people tend to see it as a separate discipline).

Place

Looking at location (eg of a library) and where a service is delivered (eg are search results delivered to the user's desktop, office, pigeonhole - or do they have to collect them).

Since then other experts have looked at the marketing mix and suggested it is much deeper in that business success is driven by PEOPLE and PROCESS.

The 4 Cs

Many now dismiss the Ps as being out of date and have developed Cs.

For example, there are the C's developed by Robert Lauterborn (1) and put forward by Philip Kotler:

• Place becomes Convenience
• Price becomes Cost to the user
• Promotion becomes Communication
• Product becomes Customer needs and wants

These C's reflect a more client-oriented marketing philosophy. They provide useful reminders - for example that you need to bear in mind the convenience of the client when deciding where to offer a service.

Some would argue that the marketing mix is too product-oriented, and that modern marketing should not focus on it. However, it does provide a handy framework for marketing analysis. The C's are also not nearly so memorable as the P-words, and marketing texts still tend to use the latter to describe the elements of the mix.

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