The Marketing Mix: The Four Major Elements

To achieve its goals, a business must create a marketing program.  The four major elements of a marketing program are:

• Planning and developing the product idea;
• Deciding how to price the product;
• Convenient placement of the product allowing for easy customer access; and
• Promotion of the new product.

Product, price, place, and promotion are the four P’s of marketing.  They make up what is known as the marketing mix (the core of a company’s marketing system.  Each element of the marketing mix is interrelated and is used to target a market in order to make a profit. 

Product:  When marketers make decisions about products, they ask themselves what product to make, when to make it, how to package and label it, how many to offer on sale, and at what level of quantity to produce at.  To answer these questions, marketers must anticipate their customers present and future needs.  Macintosh computers are a great example.  They developed a computer that was easy to operate, yet capable of rapidly processing a greater volume of work that most pc’s.  Another example, when automobile companies bring out a new line of cars, they often ask their most recent customers for their opinions on the latest models.

Price:  The price a customer is willing to pay and the price that a marketer is willing to offer a product at, determine whether or not an exchange will occur.  Many things influence pricing.  For example, number of suppliers, number of customers in a market and the availability of the product.  Sometimes customers are willing to pay a high price for something they want, such as luxury automobiles, tickets to the world cup, jewelry, and clothing.  At other times, due to the seasonal changes or a large supply of an item, marketers must lower prices on products to encourage spending.  For example an automobile dealership usually reduces its prices at the end of the year to move old models out and make room for the new inventory.  Price may also be set low when a new product is introduced into the market to encourage people to try it.

Place:  When marketers make decisions about place, they base them on how their products will get from producers or manufactures to the people who will use them.  They may decide to market their products directly to the consumers.  Or they may decide to market through intermediaries, i.e. wholesalers and retailers.  Consider Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Inc.  Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, friends and avid ice cream eaters, founded this Vermont based ice cream company in 1978.   When they decided to manufacture and market their brand of super premium ice cream, they began by selling it to their own Burlington, Vermont shop.  Before Long they decided they could reach more customers by placing their ice cream in restaurants and supermarkets and by opening new ice cream shops.  Getting the product to the customer as quickly as possible is an essential aspect of the marketing mix.  Place marketing may involve several ways of reaching customers.

Promotion:  Promotion includes all the activities designed to bring a company’s goods or services to the favorable attention of customers.  When marketers promote products, they educate potential customers about them through promotional activities such as newspapers, radio, television, magazine advertisements, and the Internet!  Billboards are a great example of promotion.  They are widely visible and they reach out to many and promote the product and a wide scale.  Attractive displays in store windows invite customers to shop and buy what they see.  Turn on your radio or your television at any time of the day, and you will hear commercials for everything from retail stores to automobiles.  Buy a newspaper or a magazine and you will find that it contains a wide variety of advertising as well. 

As you can see, many forms of promotion are effective and essential part of marketing.  By putting customers’ needs and wants at the center of the marketing plan, marketers can develop the most effective marketing mix.  If they can create the best combination of the four P’s of marketing, the company or business will find great success, like Wal-Mart for example.