4 P's of Marketing

bynishkarsh93

580 followers

Updated 9 years ago

My last post gave you insights about the concepts involved in marketing.(link here) This time, i come up with yet another important aspect of marketing: The 4 fundamental P's of marketing. What are these? What is the significance, relevance and importance of these, all would be discussed here. So, let's get straight to the topic.

McCarthy's 4 P's of Marketing

1. Product: Product simply means the goods or services you intend to offer to the target audience. The key points that should be kept in mind while designing and developing a product are:

• What should be the product be called?
• What features should it have?
• How will customers be benefited from this product?
• How would the product look?
• What should be the cost?
• How and where would the customers use it?
• The key features or the qualities which make the product stand out from it's competitors.

2. Price: The next major benchmark in this theory is the price of the product. For a customer, Price is the amount of money spend on a product offered by an organisation while for an organisation it is the amount charged by the organisation for the services it offers. While setting the price, the organisation should take care of the following important things:

• It should be value based.
• The price should be decided in relevance to what the consumers perceive.
• How would the price change for volume discounts?
• The price that an organisation would offer at the wholesale level.
• Is the price justified for the quality and quantity of product you offer?
• It should be relevant as compared to the price of the competitor's product.

If you have kept all these points in mind while deciding the price of your product, then you are on the right track! Cheers! :D

3. Place: The product should be provided to the consumers at a place which is convenient for them. Place can also be described as distribution channels chosen by an organisation for selling it's product. The place highly influences the product sales. One can now choose from a number of platforms for how to sell his product. These include:

• Franchises
• Fairs
• Online i.e. via internet
• Wholesalers
• Retailers
• Direct mail
• Distribution Channel

4. Promotion: Promotion means spreading the word in the target audience about your product or according to a marketer advertising and selling of product in the market. For better and more effective promotion, the promotion should convey a clear message to the masses which speaks for itself and influences or attracts more and more people to buy your product. The time at which you are promoting your product should be wisely chosen as it's an important ingredient for the promotion recipe. The promotional methodologies that can be adopted are:

• Catalogues
• Magazines
• Billboards
• Radio
• TV Commercials
• Online
• Telecalls
• Sales force
• Direct relation
• Personal selling
• Public relations

Good and relevant Promotion can boost up your sales chart exponentially. That's why promotion is considered such an integral and important part of marketing(a link here).

The 4 P's of marketing collectively are known as producer oriented model or sometimes as the marketing mix. They have been and are still being in use by the marketers. The 4 P's were developed decades ago and are still popular in the marketing world.

The marketing model can be helpful in planning out and launching a new product in the market. Marketing mix helps you acknowledge the 4 P's successfully and make them work in your favour to achieve better results.

Recently, the massive boom in the web and it's growth has made these 4 P's look outdated and archaic in sense of business relationships between customers and producers. Now a days customers have also become cleverer than before and reasonably judge, perceive, evaluate and then buy a product. Economists now see 4 P's as too product oriented and have stated that:

1. 4 P's leads to narrow, restricted and product based strategies which now are crucial to deliver the products.
2. It focuses too much on product quality and technology, albeit these are important in product development but they can't solely be the deciding factors
3. It diverts and distracts business.

CONCLUSION

The question that arises is that if these 4 P's are not providing with the expected outputs, what should the entrepreneurs and businessmen now use? Are these 4 P's too outdated to be used now and should be discarded away? The answer to these questions is NO. The 4 P's should be reinterpreted and designed. Also the solution to the problems encountered by the 4 P's has been found out and is termed as S.A.V.E.

S.A.V.E. would be discussed in the next article. Till then, keep reading! :D