Why your marketing mix matters

Marketing is one of the most difficult steps in growing a business and a product. It requires tremendous knowledge and a certain ability to know what might be coming next in the market. Often businesses that try to get into marketing without any professional help find themselves in a difficult situation. They need to get information from a customer base that is constantly changing and which has differing desires. If you are running a business and work for one, and if you want to capture some portion of the market you will need a strong marketing mix. Marketing mix describes a number of marketing and product areas that need to be alligned in a certain way in order to develop a successful product. The four areas that are generally included in a marketing mix are product, price, promotion and place. Maintaining a strong mixture of these four elements is absolutely integral to the health of a business and its marketing. If you emphasize only one of these elements you will probably have a difficult time selling your product in the long run. While you might have temporary success you will find that companies who make it in the long run have a strong marketing mix.

Marketing mix matters because it describes certain aspects of the marketing process that you can control and which always make a huge difference. In each area of the marketing mix you will need to make key choices. None of these choices can be passed up or substituted for each other. In terms of product design you obviously need to make certain decisions regarding packaging, warranty, brand name, safety, and any number of other options. In terms of price decisions you obviously need to do some market research to see how similar products are selling in the market. This could also include decisions about wholesale prices and about sales and discounts. Besides this you will need to make some tough choices regarding distribution. For example, you need to think about inventory, distribution centers, product placement, and product transportation. Promotion decisions are extremely important as well; think about how you are going to advertise your product and how things like sales promotions and public relations are going to affect your problem.

Using these four P's in a marketing mix will help you to develop a strong marketing plan. It will help you to think of your product in a more holistic way. Many people simply think about marketing but don't realize that marketing can't be carried out without other work being done on your product. You need to know things about price, distribution, and product placement before you can seriously market a product. A common mistake of so many businesses is that they don't try to look at the product in a unified manner. They tend to think about marketing but they don't consider how other factors will influence their decisions.

Using a strong marketing mix could be compared to using a recipe. You consider certain ingredients and add them based on a plan. If you leave out a key ingredient your meal is almost certainly ruined. Marketing is a similar sort of situation; it requires considering many different elements and combining them in a certain way. If an part is left out the final product will almost invariably meet with failure. Considering the amount of time that you put into marketing a new product, don't you think it would be a good idea to have a good marketing mix? One poorly produced and placed product can spell the end for many businesses.