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.
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.
There is a lot that digital marketers can learn from the story of “The Little Red Hen,” but the main lesson is that a seed can produce a loaf of bread when given the proper amount of time and care. In this digital age, brands want to see results and success immediately; they want proof that the strategy set into place is actually working and paying off. However, sometimes results take longer time to measure, which is why it is essential to set both short-term and long-term goals for content marketing strategies.
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.
Ansoff’s Matrix was designed to show how the markets and their products can be manipulated to the advantage of the organisation. It has four sections that are depicted as, Market Penetration, Product Development, Market Development and Diversification.
The Digital Buyer – Uses 21st century technology to do their own goal-driven research, shares on-line content and takes part in on-line conversations with trusted relationships before they contact a provider. Once they are engaged with specific providers, they expect the active use of technology from the provider to improve their experience. Finally, they create their...
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:
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
In this new era of shopping, customers have more information at their fingertips. They surf the web diligently and compare prices at their leisure.
In particular, the Internet and the evolution of technological trends such as social media, mobile technology, cloud computing or big data have offered new ways of doing business and leads to digital business models (Uhl et al., 2014, p. 1). Digital technologies provide new channels for selling products but also change consumer behaviour by empowering them in having unlimited access to a huge quantity and quality of information, hence they can choose between competitors. This digital revolution represents a fundamental change in the business of all sizes and especially has shaken marketing to its core. Companies are facing new ICT enabling an interactive communication with customers and the brand message can be delivered through various new
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
The 4 Ps of marketing refers to the terms product, price, promotion and place. These four components make up what is known as the ‘marketing mix’. Each of the Ps focuses on a different element of the marketing mix. Product refers to the actual good or service on offer from a business. Price refers to the price set for the aforementioned product, and the particular pricing strategy that the firm has chosen to implement. Promotion refers to the promotional strategies that are used to sell the product, and the communication that is undertaken to persuade customers to purchase the product. Finally, place refers to the method of distribution used to get the good and/or service from the firm to the customer. The 4 Ps marketing mix is commonly
Price is the amount of money that consumers will give to obtain goods. Price is one of the important factors in companies’ success, yet marketing contributes in determining price for companies’ products. Companies might set the price without marketing but they will likely to set inappropriate prices for customers, which can be expensive or cheap price. On one hand, when the price is too cheap companies surely will lose profit, on the other hand when it set to higher price companies will lose customers. In this case Marketing plays its role. According to Ashe-Edmunds (2016), marketing’s role in price is to determine what the price should be to maximize sales, when sales increase, the companies are likely to gain profit. This statement proves that marketing involvement is necessary as marketing contribution has an impact to companies’ profit. That is why marketing is so important as it contributes in determining price to ensure the profitability of companies. Without marketing business will find it difficult to determine prices. As a result, marketing is important because it helps to determine price. In other words, marketing helps to put the right price to maximize