Marketing Mix - McCarthy’s four Ps:
Professor Jerome McCarthy introduced in the early 1960s a marketing mix which consists of the 4 Ps: product, price, place and promotion (Kotler, 1999, p. 94). Traditionally, efficient product, price, place and promotion strategies would lead to a successful business but in today’s society, due to such technological advancements, the internet is changing the way we sell our products and services, and therefore organisations now need online strategies to attract and retain customers. The e-marketing mix considers how the 4 Ps can be presented online in order to give that firm a competitive advantage through digital marketing (Learn Marketing, 2014).
Product:
Digital marketers must keep up-to-date with the consumers preference, trends and needs, in order to meet these needs and to be able to remain competitive in the market . The connectivity created by digital media leads to enhanced product benefits such as online games and applications (Pride & Ferell, 2014). However, the use of the internet to sell products could be a disadvantage to the business since the goods being sold are intangible, the consumer could research and find reviews describing a product as low quality which could result in sale losses (Brand Driven Digital, 2013).
“The Ansoff Matrix (appendix C) shows four different growth strategies that result by combining existing or new products with existing or new markets: market penetration, market development, product development,and diversification” (Fadaei, 2014).
Price:
Digital marketing such as the internet has allowed consumers to easily compare prices online through apps from app stores or price comparison websites such as pricerunner.co.uk. This can reduce search costs for t...
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Marketing is a process of determining a consumer’s needs, devising a product or service to satisfy those needs, and trying to focus customers on the goods and services you are offering. Marketing is extremely important, and a fundamental building block for business growth. A marketing team is given the task of creating customer awareness through a variety of different marketing techniques. If a business does not pay close attention to their consumer demographic and needs, they will eventually fail over time. Two important aspects of marketing include acquiring new customers, and the preservation and growth of relationships with current customers. Marketing has always been viewed as a creative outlet, which encompassed advertising, distribution, and the selling of goods and services. Marketing staff will also try to anticipate what customers will want in the future, often being accomplished with market research. In summation, a good marketing plan should be able to create a favorable proposition or series of benefits that a customer can value through goods or services. The marketing mix is normally described as the strategic positioning of a product or service in the marketplace, using the specification of the four Ps. During the early 1960’s, Professor E. Jerome McCarthy of Harvard Business School stated that a marketing mix contains four elements. The four key points are product, pricing, promotion, and placement. It is recognized that all these aspects must be present to ensure a successful business model within a given industry. We will now take a thorough look at the four marketing mix points.
This typology of a consumer is not a niche and in 2014 it was estimated that over 150 million US consumers can be labeled “Consumer 2.0”, this has certainly increased even more throughout 2015. Consumer 2.0 is more likely to access digital information, less trusting of brand-sponsored advertising, more comfortable buying online and less reliant on their own physical experience in making a purchase decision. These 2.0consumers have a lot of trust and take into account the opinions and experiences of their close circles and trusted connections. Taking the existence of the 2.0 consumer into account when creating a digital marketing strategy is a primordial step for brands today and they must facilitate their needs with the possibility of shared experience and interconnectivity amongst consumers while implementing systems to measure their impact on the business. (Bill Hanifin, 2011).
Ansoff's matrix provides a very simple but very effective focus for considering different options for growth, and shows whether it is better to find new customers for existing products, offer more products to the existing consumer, or stay with existing products and attempt to gain a greater share of the market.
In summary, “Internet activities are not most significant in competition, such as informing customers, processing transactions, and procuring inputs”. (Porter, 2001) significant corporate assets--skilled employees, proprietary product, and efficient logistical systems – these factors are the most important to keep competitive advantages. In fact, it is foreseeable that the Internet's evolution will come up in the future involve a shift “in thinking from e-business to business, from e-strategy to strategy”. (Porter, 2001)Only by integrating the Internet into overall strategy will this powerful new technology become an equally powerful force for competitive advantage.
E-marketing is a fast growing and rapid platform for any form of business. EBay has been highly successful over recent years and this is a perfect example of an online business. The internal and external environments are constantly changing and in order to keep up with these changes, businesses and organisations must make relevant changes, and generate new strategies to keep up with contemporary developments in e-marketing and to also maintain their position in their market in comparison to their competitors.
On the Ansoff matrix below is shown what growth strategies for new and existing products and markets can be used from the company.
So, for the future, she must implement his strategies to continue and improve his efficacy and efficiency. To propose achievable strategies, we will use Ansoff matrix. This tool allows to classify and explain the different growth strategies for a company. Ansoff 's Matrix is also known as the market options matrix (Lynch, 2009, p.313) and is designed to identify “the product and market options available to the organization, including the possibility of withdrawal and movement into unrelated markets”. It is represented diagrammatically as follows.
The Ansoff business analysis tool decides on the very best method for promoting growth through marketing new or current products to new or current market. Ansoff’s growth strategy is divided into 4 quadrants namely:
The marketing mix can be synthesized in the expression of “the 4 P’s”, standing for Product, Price, Place and Promotion.
In all reality, all businesses will, in some way shape or form, complete all of the marketing activities, even if completing these activities is not their main goal. (Dlabay 2006.) These marketing activities are product, place, price, and promotion. A business tool called that marketing mix takes all of these activities and puts them together in a way that can be used to help improve a business’s marketing strategy. Product is what the company is selling; Place is where the consumer will obtain this product; Price is what the consumer will pay for the product; Promotion is any type of communication that is intended to remind, inform, or persuade. (Dlabay 2006.) The marketing mix and the four P’s describe very well what business marketing is all about.
The future of economic competitiveness for most enterprises relies on entrance and active participation in the e-commerce market. An essential problem with e-commerce is that the controls and organization are different for each site. There is no standard way of building t...
Systems are put in place to obtain market feedback which measures success against short-term targets. The marketing mix plays a big role in any marketing’s business strategies. This means that the 4P’s, Price, Promotion, production and place. Works Cited Subway Target Markets n.d., Leading Edge Education 2007, accessed 19 August 2011, http://tutor2u.net/business/gcse/marketing_intro.htm>. Start up Businesses website n.d., EStartup business blog and contributors, accessed 19 August 2011, http://www.estartup.org/business/internet-marketing/how-small-business-internet-marketing-can-help-your-business-succeed>.
Consider that in the early days of TV, when the new medium was not as yet entirely understood, there were separate ‘TV planners’ who created a ‘TV strategy’ for the brand. Over time, this was incorporated into the overall marketing strategy (as it should be). The same is going to happen with digital. Increasingly, digital thinking is being incorporated into marketing strategy from day one. This section considers digital strategy separately in order to highlight some differences in approach, but this should change in practice over time. Digital Marketing strategy builds on and adapts the principles of traditional marketing, using the opportunities and challenges offered by the digital
Businesses use the media to convince consumers to buy their products. Since the start of mass media, companies have used communication to broadcast to large numbers of people about their product (Shah). Companies spend a great amount of money to encourage people to buy their product, by winning them over (Shah). The media provides information, rates, and suggests new products and services such as movies, computers, restaurants, books, fashion items, and more (Rinallo and Basuroy). Back in the days where brands had to buy advertising or secure media placements are gone. Today it is becoming really hard to know the difference between the role of marketer and publisher. This gives the chance for companies to become satisfied conservators, making their own items on their websites for their businesses (“Media Influence”). More and more people are considering traditional advertisements as untrustworthy; in fact, 75% of people do not think traditional advertisements are true. Companies uses online advertisements to influence people to buy their product. People today are trying to make more informed buying choices, using all the information they can find online. A person’s online experience can influence them to shop at a particular store; in fact, 91% of people shop at stores because of reviews online (Peneycad). People spend a large amount of time researching products before they decide to buy them. 86% of people use search engines to research products. 62% of people who research products online buy products in the store. People who research services and products online are more likely to make a buying decision (Peneycad). 78% of people are influenced by post from companies on social media websites. 72% of people are trusting of online recommendations of products. Peneycad mentions,“This means 72% of people trust complete strangers just as [much] as people they know when it comes to making a purchase decision (Peneycad 2).
According to Linda Peters (1998), the “Web” presents a fundamentally different environment – both as a medium and as a market – from traditional communication channels perspective. It creates the Marketspace – a virtual realm where products and services exist as digital information and can be delivered through information-based channels (Rayport and Svikola, 1994). The companies and consumers quickly adopted the new concept of the new interactive world for their own benefits. These interactive channels allowed companies to reach new markets or have a greater influence in the existing one’s (i.e. example media companies transferred their newspapers in order to reach new audiences) and the consumers had an opportunity to save time and money by