How to understand and create the right marketing mix

What does it mean to create the right marketing mix? Why mix marketing? Why mix up your marketing, when everyone knows that great marketing is simple marketing, straightforward, clear, easily understood. Understanding and creating the right marketing mix, I think, is knowing how to communicate with different people differently according to their different needs. We all know that people are complicated. People, certainly, can be straightforward, clear, and easily understood-but they are also each unique, complicated, unpredictable. Understanding and creating the right marketing mix means developing an approach to marketing that take the above truths into consideration. Don't get overwhelmed! There are plenty of businesses that have proven time and time again that there are ways to tap into this seemingly daunting formula. Let's think of a few things, a few ideas, to get us started. Let's think of some ways to understand and create the right marketing mix.

1. How to understand and create the right marketing mix means different things. For one, it could mean the ways in which you advertise. Let's say for conversation's sake that you design, create, and sell video games. That's a booming business, right? But some companies do it better than others, and some companies do it way, way better than those companies, and some companies understand the mixing of marketing so well that they've become empires. What have they done? What's their big secret? Again, we come to the question of ways of advertising. You've got to think: Where to people go to find out about new video games? What do video game fans do besides play video games? How likely is a video game player to understand the technology of computers and the mysteries of the Internet? And so forth. And then you advertise in all those venues that seem appropriate, whether it be television, magazine, Internet, newspaper, shopping mall, radio, whatever.
2. OK, so you're selling video games. But not all video gamers are the same. Some are old and some are young. Some are girls and some are boys. Some like violent games, some like games that allow you to create new worlds. How are you going to create the right marketing mix for such a diverse group? Well, you're assisted right off the bat by the fact that all gamers have one thing in common: they're mad for games. Now it's time to some research, and discover which games are selling quickly to which groups, and which games are selling poorly to those groups, and which games that sell poorly to one group sell quickly to another group, and what parents are thinking about video games, and so on.
3. Let's stay with that last point for a moment. What are parents thinking about video games these days? Are they worried that their children aren't reading anymore? Are they worried that their children are becoming to comfortable with the idea of guns and violence? If so, how do you reach out to those parents? How do you create the right marketing mix for them? How do you create a marketing mix that attracts the young, eager gamer and the old, cautious parent at the same time? To do such a thing perfectly is most likely impossible. But there are ways of approximating the ideal, and you and your marketing team must gather and use all your brain power, experience, common sense, and creativity to formulate the right plan.
4. Learning how to understand and create the right marketing mix is a tangled business, all right, but once you untangle it it's good business.