Marketing Mix: A Comprehensive Guide to Strategies and Tactics



A foundational concept in the marketing world, the marketing mix serves as a framework for strategizing how to bring products or services to market. It was formalized in the mid-20th century around the “Four Ps”—Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. Time has added additional Ps—People, Process, and Physical Evidence—that some now say are even more relevant in our service-oriented economy. Meanwhile, the core of the marketing mix hasn’t changed: it’s still a structured way to think about how to design, deliver, and communicate value to customers. Who wouldn’t want a piece of that action? All right, let’s dig into the marketing mix and see why it’s still a thing when so many other concepts in our field have fallen by the wayside.

Comprehending the Four Ps of Marketing Mix

The Four Ps form the traditional marketing mix’s cornerstone, giving companies a guideline to effectively market their offerings. These components cover the what, how, where, and why of marketing—addressing all the crucial bases for effectively capturing and keeping customers.

Product: The Heart of the Marketing Mix

Every marketing scheme begins with the merchandise on offer. Although it’s true that some enterprises earn vast profits from what they provide or perform as services, most rely heavily on the products they produce. Indeed, even service firms often have what they call “proprietary products” that act as the heart of any service firm they might provide.

What Is a Product?

At its most elemental and simple definition, a product is a thing. But what that “thing” is can be very varied, as you well know. Products can be anything from cars to websites. They can also be quite different in nature from one another, such as a car being a tangible object you can touch, drive, and enjoy.

Price: Finding a Balance Between Value and Revenue

Price is a key driver of consumer behavior; it directly affects revenue and how a product is positioned in the marketplace. To establish a pricing model, firms must account for several calculations and variables. One is simply what it costs to produce the item and how much is needed over and above that cost to make a profit. That’s known as cost-based pricing. Then there’s value-based pricing, which focuses on what consumers think the product is worth. This is common when firms use the pricing strategy for luxury items or items that somehow confer status. Finally, there’s dynamic pricing, where contemporary firms try to harness the power of the data economy.

Ensuring Accessibility of Placement

Known as distribution, placement determines where and how products will be sold. The target may be the broadest market imaginable, or a niche segment, and placement decisions will either lead to or inhibit success in approaching that segment. When the consumer journey is mapped out, that pathway from manufacturer to consumer must be a clear one to achieve any kind of significant penetration. There are distribution decisions that link together to form a distribution system, and there are individual decision points where choosing one alternative over another can make all the difference.

Promotion: Conveying Value

You want to communicate the value of your business directly to your potential customers in a way that persuades them to engage with you and encourages them to make a purchase. All of the following methods still function as direct conduits for delivering your message.

• Advertising: While television commercials and print ads are still forms of relevant “promotional work,” the digital advertising landscape of today, with its social media platforms, pay-per-click (PPC) opportunities, and displayed ads, as well as the good old fashion word-of-mouth of yesteryear, dominates the modern day.
• Public Relations: Press releases and events still serve a “public relations role,” too. After all, how well folks perceive you and your brand directly functions with how “good” a relation you have “with the public.”
• Content Marketing and Storytelling: Engaging content is par excellence at building the kind of “direct consumer connections” that lead to brand loyalty.

Broaden the Marketing Mix for Service Industries

As the marketing field evolved, businesses that offered services began incorporating additional Ps into their frameworks—People, Process, and Physical Evidence. These elements reflect more closely the characteristics of a service and the nature of the customer relationship.

Individuals: The Face of the Brand

Employees and representatives are necessary components of the customer experience. Their influence on customer satisfaction makes them the most potent ambassadors of the brand. A potent force, however, can also be a weak link if not managed properly. This is why the first step in becoming a potent force is recruitment. It is an unfortunate fact that many have seen too many times that a poor hire is a huge blow to customer satisfaction.

Method: Making Service Delivery More Efficient

Service delivery is the interaction between a customer and service provider. For the customer, it is the moment of truth; for the service provider, it is a business process that involves many steps. My goal was to concentrate on the way these steps flow from one to another, taking into account that there might be many customer contact points along the way. The steps involved in delivering a service collectively make up a “service delivery process.”

Service Delivery and the Evaluation Process

Customers often assess services by their physical components. This is particularly true for services with high “experience” qualities, that is, where the customer must be present to consume the service. Components of the service that may be physically present to the customer at the time of service performance can give clues to the customer about the nature and quality of the service being performed.

What are the 4 Cs and 7 Ps?

While the marketing mix has continued to evolve, newer models like the 4 Cs have been introduced. Robert Lauterborn proposed the 4 Cs model in 1990. It focuses on Consumer, Cost, Communication, and Convenience—concepts that emphasize strategies centered around the consumer, as opposed to the set of firm-centric approaches that their predecessor models focused on.

Another recent evolution includes the 7 Cs Compass Model. This model integrates co-marketing efforts and emphasizes the mutual value creation that businesses and their partners engage in.

The Marketing Mix Applied to Digital Channels

Since the birth of digital marketing, the Four Ps framework has been adapted for an online context. Offering virtual products like subscriptions and downloading “the cloud” has to be integrated into the appearance of a business’s offerings if not its actual offerings. This is Product.

Price is somewhat similar, except that real-time adjustments can be made, and also comparisons to online competitors can be made, which is really what online consumers are doing all the time. It’s really more Price, Place, (or, “where are we present online”) and Promotion that online alters how we think about or what we even mean by the Marketing Mix.—Robert D. Hurst

Using Automation Tools to Boost Marketing Mix Models

WoopSocial is an example of a tool that can help “enhance the marketing mix.” In WoopSocial’s case, it is concerned mostly with the automation of sub-critical tasks related to promotion. WoopSocial can help businesses do some of the heavy lifting that, in a past era, required a business to employ a full-time social media director. And because WoopSocial is an automation tool, it not only provides assistance in a business’s promotional efforts but does so while saving the business time, and offering a way of achieving sufficient, if not more than sufficient, “critical mass” for reaching the business’s appearance goals across various digital platforms.

To sum up, the marketing mix is a flexible and adaptable framework that can be applied to virtually any industry or market condition. It is an effective strategy to use for any of your brands because it is easy to understand; its components (the traditional Four Ps, the extended Seven Ps, or their digital adaptations) can be worked into any compelling storyline. The marketing mix, in all its iterations, remains a powerful tool for business growth. In a fast-moving world, hopefully, using a tool like WoopSocial will help reveal new opportunities for optimization and leverage meaningful customer engagement.