Marketing Mix
According to Al Badi (2018), the marketing mix is the set of strategies that a business utilizes to sell its product brand. A typical marketing mix comprises the 4 Ps: price, product, promotion, and place. In some ways, balancing the 4 Ps to meet customer needs is comparable to leveraging the mix. The demands and needs of the customer who may eventually buy the goods must be considered while determining the price, the product, the promotion, and the place.
Price is the value attributed to a product and is determined by several direct and indirect factors, including production costs, the target market, the market’s willingness to pay, supply and demand, and a variety of other factors.
Contrarily, a product is a good or service a business is trying to convince customers they want or need. Consumers must desire the goods, and businesses must demonstrate to customers that they cannot survive without their specific product.
Promotion is the strategy that businesses frequently employ utilizes to create demand for a product. Advertising, press coverage, word-of-mouth, incentives, commissions, and prizes for the trade are typically used in promotion. Other examples of promotion include direct marketing, consumer schemes, competitions, prizes, and contests.
Place refers to the point or location where sales are made. Notably, the place should facilitate easy access to the product and make the purchase process easy for the customers. A place can also refer to the placement of items within a store.
Marketing Process
According to Storbacka & Moser (2020), marketing is the identification, development, promotion, and distribution of products to satisfy consumer needs and wants. The marketing process involves five major steps: customer analysis, creating a customer-oriented marketing strategy, developing a marketing plan, building a profitable relationship with customers, and receiving value from customers.
The customer analysis phase involves the identification of the opportunities in the market, such as the customers` wants, needs, and demands. Understanding the marketplace is essential as it aids in the determination of the customers` needs, wants, and demands. Understanding the customers` needs and wants makes efforts to build want-satisfying market offerings and value-laden customer relationships easy. Additionally, there is an increment of customer equity in the long term.
After customer analysis, there is the creation of a customer-driven marketing strategy. In this phase, there is the identification of the market. The market, which is customers to serve, is divided into specific segments (Seturi & Urotadze, 2017). The categorization of the customers can be based on the nature of demand, timing, and level. Additionally, in this phase, businesses usually determine their value proposition to their customers, such as benefits to be enjoyed by customers to gain a market advantage over their competitors.
The third step is developing a marketing plan that aims to create value for the intended customers by integrating the 4Ps of the marketing mix. As a result, there is communication and delivery of the customers` expected value. After that, building a customer relationship aims to generate high customer equity by creating superior customer satisfaction and value. Finally, valuables are captured from customers in the forms of buyers` capital and profits. An increase in loyalty among the profitable customers in the business usually leads to higher customer equity.
Product Life Cycle
Product life cycle refers to the process a product undergoes from its introduction to the market and removal from the market. The four stages of the life cycle are introduction, growth, maturity, and decline.
The introduction stage involves the release of a new product into the market. The costs, such as marketing and promotions, are relatively high. Typically there is little competition in this stage as the product is new. The primary goals of the introduction stage are to increase the product’s demand to the consumers and get it into their hands to gain later on from its escalating popularity.
In the growth stage, consumers’ consumption and purchase of the products start. Due to the increased popularity and sales of the product, there is awareness of the product among other competitors; thus, the competition is high (Sraders, 2021). Due to the competition, the product’s function and features are modified to gain market share. Additionally, the company may spend more on product advertisement and promotion.
In the maturity stage, product sales are slow due to market saturation. Additionally, pricing is very competitive, resulting in low-profit margins due to increased competition and low demand. Due to high market saturation, less successful products are usually pushed out of the market. Product innovation and new product development services are strategies to maintain the market share at this stage.
Finally, there is a decline stage characterized by a significant drop in product sales and a change in consumer behavior due to low product demand. There is a continuous loss of market share by the product and sales deterioration due to competition. At this stage, marketing is minimal. The product gets out of the market or maybe redesigned by the company to remain in demand.
References
Sraders, A. (2021). What Is the Product Life Cycle? Stages and Examples. TheStreet. https://www.thestreet.com/markets/commodities/product-life-cycle-14882534
Seturi, M., & Urotadze, E. (2017). About Marketing Process Model and Relationship Marketing. In Proceedings of International Workshop “Model-Based Governance for Smart Organizational Future (pp. 169-171).
Al Badi, K. S. (2018). The Impact of Marketing Mix on the Competitive Advantage of the SME Sector in the Al Buraimi Governorate in Oman. SAGE Open, 8(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244018800838
Storbacka, K., & Moser, T. (2020). The changing role of marketing: transformed propositions, processes and partnerships. AMS Review, 10(3-4), 299–310. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13162-020-00179-4
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