Article: Marketing Mix. A Recipe for Success

Increased competition, lower margins, sales are variable; your website is just sitting there; it’s raining. What to do?

When you ask yourself those questions it is time to recheck the mix of the five ‘P’ ingredients Price, Product, Place, Promotion and People in your marketing recipe.

As with any recipe varying quantities of the principle ingredients will produce different results. It is the same with the marketing mix. The offer you make to your customer can be altered by varying the mix elements. For example, with a high profile brand you would increase the focus on ‘Promotion’ and desensitize the weight given to ‘Price’.

Admittedly it is not easy. There are vast arrays of circumstances dictating which elements of the marketing mix should be employed and in which proportion. If you have put sufficient time into accurately defining your marketplace, your market segment, your product positioning, and your unique selling propositions then it becomes much easier to carry out this task.

It must be stressed that taking time to think through your marketing strategy forces you to take some very difficult decisions. The most difficult ones are those where you decide not to do certain things; such as deciding certain market sectors are not key factors to your company's success due to the difficulty in competing effectively. In other words, “If a product or service is not selling, why continue with it?”

The benefits of taking such decisions are that it really helps you to focus on a more limited and achievable set of objectives. It then becomes much clearer which elements of your marketing mix need to be used to yield profitable results from your marketing budget.

Companies who have not found their Web site to be successful need to understand that creating a Web site is not by itself an Internet marketing presence. If you intend to use the Internet in your recipe, ‘Promotion’ becomes a more complex ingredient.

With an Internet recipe, traditional media such as print, radio, television and direct mail can all be functionally integrated with your website. It should also be noted that a web site is not designed to be the only element of your marketing mix. Similarly, if only traditional media are used, there is an entire world market you may be missing.

When you are developing your marketing campaign for the Internet you need to realize that each media has its own purpose. Print media provides information for products & services; radio advertising provides immediacy for news or sales; television reaches people using it for entertainment; and the Internet provides a way for people to find or verify product information, do more research on particular products and even make a purchase. A Web site should therefore be designed specifically for its own function to derive the best benefit.

If all elements of the marketing mix are used appropriately, each form of media should complement each other in order to serve all of your target markets needs, and positively impact your business.

As with any successful recipe, each ingredient should do something different but together they reinforce each other. - John Shenton - May 21, 2002