Marketing - the last of the 4P's

Here’s the last of the 4 P’s of marketing – PROMOTION

It all means nothing if the benefit of your product hasn’t been clearly communicated to your target market. This might be a mix of:

Public relations

Advertising

Sales promotion – a short term fix to increase sales, maybe with money off coupons

Personal selling

Direct mail

Internet marketing

You will need a well thought out message strategy. What message are you trying to convey and to whom? How will you deliver the message? Will it be through some branding, design or logos? The message should emphasise the benefit of the product and help the business in positioning the product.

Will you use a push or pull strategy perhaps? A push strategy is where the manufacturer concentrates marketing effort on retailers to convince them to stock the product. A pull strategy is where the business instead concentrates on consumers to create demand. Or some of both?

An old favourite – AIDA. It’s a communication model to aid selling. It’s an acronym for Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. When you are new in the market with your product, you first need Attention. Once you’ve done that how can you hold Interest, through stating benefits etc? Then how do you make your product Desirable? A demonstration, perhaps? The lastly, purchase Action – make it easy to purchase.

As your products move through the 4 stages of a product life cycle, you will need to promote them differently to ensure the best success and longest life of each product.

Introduction – new product, so you need to inform the target customers. You may need quite a bit of effort, with Push and Pull strategies at this crucial phase.

Growth – as the product becomes accepted, you need to work on a strategy of increasing brand awareness to encourage loyalty.

Maturity – brings increased competition, so the business needs to persuade customers to buy theirs and not a rival. Display differential advantage to the target audience to inform them of benefits.

Decline – use a strategy of reminding the customers of the product to slow down the inevitable. You may change the price to increase sales.

You will also want to ensure that you have different products at different stages of their product life cycles, to ensure you don’t have a sudden slump in sales, or cannot meet demand if there is a big increase.

There you are- the 4 P’s of marketing, in as short a form as I can manage it. Our strategy sessions focus a lot on marketing and the pricing conundrum. You just have to ask.

Marketing - the 3rd of the 4P's

Here’s the third P of the 4 P’s of marketing. It’s

PLACE

It means how you will distribute the product or service you have, not where you will base yourself. You must get the product to the user at the right place and at the right time – the right place and time for the user, that is. This means effective distribution or you will not meet your marketing objectives. If the business underestimates demand and customers cannot buy from you, then obviously profits will go down, but more importantly, reputation will be lost as customers will know not to try and buy from you again.

There are two types of distribution channel available – indirect and direct. Indirect means distributing your product via a wholesaler who may sell to a retailer then on to a customer. Direct means from you straight to customer. The direct channel gives you complete control over the product, and usually means better margins (you are not giving anything away to wholesalers or retailers), but your ability to sell in volume is limited.

There are three common distribution strategies available.

Intensive distribution – to distribute a low priced or impulse purchase like chocolates

Exclusive distribution – to a single outlet. Usually for high priced products and needs an intermediary to add detail into the selling process.

Selective distribution – a small number of retailers are chosen, and is commonly used to distribute items such as computers or household appliances, where customers shop around and manufacturers want a large geographical spread.

If a business decides on one of the later two strategies, then it should choose intermediaries who are experienced in the industry and have credibility amongst the target customers.