

Ways you can align your pricing with your customer: If customers view the product as on par with competitors’ products, you may need to discount your price below the competition to earn customers. If customers view your offering as unique or high value, you can charge more. This means you understand the value of your offering from the customer’s perspective, which also includes their time and effort to acquire the product. You'll want to align pricing with the value customers perceive for the product. There are many different strategies for pricing that can be employed here, but ultimately, it’s about lining up your business and marketing objectives with an understanding of what price the market will bear. This part of the marketing mix is about determining the price for your goods or services. The Happy Meal combines food and a beverage with a toy, and is designed for customers who are children, down to its name and packaging. If it’s been around, perhaps they’ve already tried it.Ī real world example is the Happy Meal product sold at McDonald’s. If it’s new, consumers need to be educated about it. Is it a new product, or perhaps it’s been around awhile? This affects how customers react to the product. Product life cycle: Understand where your product is in its product life cycle.Is your product a premium good or service? Is it utilitarian, efficient, or inexpensive? This affects how customers perceive your offering, as well as how you may want to name and package the product. Product branding: Think about how you want customers to perceive the product’s brand.This ensures an alignment between product benefits and customer needs. The buyer persona: To that end, a tool like the buyer persona, a profile of the customer characteristics that are a fit for your offerings, can help articulate the types of customers you’re targeting for the product.This means you’ve got to understand the customer as well as, or even better than, the product. You might think your product is fantastic, but a skeptical customer wants to know what makes it different from that of your competitors, and how it will meet their needs. The benefits of the product should be communicated through the lens of the customer. The product should solve a problem or need for the customer. Anything sold to generate revenue can be classified as the product part of the marketing mix, from manufacturing razor blades to providing legal advice. The marketing mix starts with the goods or services offered by the business. Moreover, the marketing mix is fluid, allowing the marketing team to emphasize any one area in the strategy as needed based on market conditions and what’s best for the targeted customer segment.īecause the labels in the marketing mix are so broad, it’s helpful to examine each in detail to understand these four principles and how they work together. Also, these areas are interdependent they work together to complement and align all the parts of a marketing plan. It’s important to note that the customer is the focal point of each area in the marketing mix. The elements that make up each area form the tactical components of a marketing strategy. It identifies the key high-level areas to address as part of any marketing plan, such as a go-to-market strategy for launching a product. The marketing mix concept was introduced in the 1950s and was refined into the four Ps framework in the 1960s. These basic marketing principles, often referred to as the four Ps or the marketing mix, are a framework that underpins marketing 101.īy mixing these four ingredients in different ways (hence the term marketing mix), you can produce a synergy between all four that drives product adoption within your target markets. At a glance: Here are the principles of marketing Understanding each of these marketing terms is the key to building a strong strategy. It introduces the company’s goods and services to potential customers, and informs existing ones of additional opportunities to buy.įorming the foundation of that strategy are four core marketing principles that enable the effective execution of a marketing strategy. Every business needs a marketing strategy.
