WHAT IS MARKETING MIX

What is marketing mix (the 4p) and why it is important to a company.

What is marketing mix (the 4p) and why it is important to a company

Introduction

Understanding the marketing mix in your business is crucial to your success as an entrepreneur. Marketing mix is a term used by marketing professionals to describe the different factors that affect a company's attempt to reach customers. To sell a product successfully, a company must do many things in addition to developing the product. Chief among these tasks is determining a target market (segment of the population likely to buy the product under consideration) and understanding that target market's needs and wants. Based on this understanding, a company must determine the appropriate marketing tactics for the product. The details about how to encourage people to buy a product can be broken down into decisions regarding the four factors that together make up the marketing mix. These factors, often referred to as the “four Ps of marketing,” are product, price, place, and promotion.

A product is any good, service, or mixture of goods and services that is being offered to consumers. Price is, of course, the amount of money that the company asks consumers to pay for its product. Place refers to the location where the product will be available to consumers, relative to its channel of distribution (the path the product follows between manufacturing and final purchase). Promotion, finally, is the term used to describe all the methods a company has of communicating with its customers. A company must consider each decision regarding the four Ps as it relates to the target market. If the company accurately understands the needs and wants of the target market and mixes its decisions regarding each of the four Ps accordingly, it has a solid chance of connecting with customers. (Yudelson, 1999, 326)

When Did It Begin

The Harvard Business School professor Neil H. Borden first devised the concept of the marketing mix in the late 1940s. It was another marketing academic, E. Jerome McCarthy of Michigan State University, who refined the idea of the marketing mix by breaking it down into the four basic elements that he called the four Ps. The concept became well known as a result of McCarthy's 1960 textbook Basic Marketing: A Global Management Approach. Since its initial publication, when it was the first textbook to outline the four Ps, Basic Marketing has been updated more than a dozen times (with the help of coauthor William D. Perrault), and it remains one of the most popular marketing texts in the world. (Wolf, 1998, 449)

Discussion and Analysis

The marketing mix is a critical component in the development of marketing plans and strategies. The marketing mix encompasses all of the elements that impact an organization's ability to successfully take its products and services to market -- product, price, place and promotion. It is the effective mix, or combination, of these components -- not the success of any individual elements -- that contributes to the ...