The Marketing Mix goes back to 1949 and the 4Ps: Product, Price, Promotion, and Place.
Product is not just what you make, what services and products you provide, but how the product is perceived by the customer, not just what you make. For example, an iPhone. People are deeply passionate about the iPhone, and that’s because the product is not just a phone as bought by the customer. To understanding your product and how it’s perceived by the customers is important.
Price is also important. If you only ever compete on price, there is only one way and that is down. You have to understand the value that your product and understand the lever that is priced and it’s one offset only.
Promotion. Over the last few months with so many companies in lock-down promotion has become a vital tool. business today, certainly for survival tomorrow. What are you doing in terms of your promotion to make sure that you stay very current with your customers build relationship with potential customers?
Place. Trading online is simple. You do not actually need to have a trading premise anymore. You can do it from a room in your house and have great customer service. Lots of very loyal customers and a nice healthy business. Where are your customers now? Are you trading around the world? Why not?
We go through to the 1980s. The 4P’s, the Marketing Mix, became the 7Ps. We added People, Process and Physical evidence.
At the heart of any company are the people, the people that run it, and the people working for your company; but wider than that. The suppliers, your associates, everyone involved. And there are companies that have built their entire go-to-market strategy in this way.
You need good, efficient Process. They enable the company to operate efficiently. They remove some of the cost. And they also enable you to respond quickly to changes within the customer demand, or potentially what petitioners doing.
Physical evidence, the environment in which you work that matters now is more to the staff. It also matters to even if it is online.
The other ones I think is fundamental to our future:
Productivity. What is productivity? How do you measure yourselves against your competitors in terms of quality, flexibility and adaptability. Not just about how well you support your customer, but it’s also operational performance. When you have a company, you have customer feedback that tells you how you are serving your customers today. When you have a change in regulations, or there’s a dynamic shift in demand how do you react, how capable Are you of turning that around? Productivity isn’t just about the assembly of product. Productivity is about being nimble and agile. Productivity was added a couple of years ago by many marketing practitioners and I think it makes sense that it stay as part of the new Marketing Mix Over the last few months, world has been through two very interesting challenges. Many people now work more from home and where you work has become less important. A lot of other changes have taken place too. There are cities around the world where for the first time in in a generation, some sights and buildings are now visible in views that it’s still until COVID-19 were not visible.
Planet is the ninth P. The best companies of tomorrow and companies working today, their environmental credentials matter hugely; but not just your own environmental credentials, your whole supply chain. The designed company of the future will have to put Planet at the heart of everything they do. The 7Ps, was the 4Ps. Now we have the 9Ps. How do you score on your planet?