The 7 P's of marketing include product, price, promotion, place, people, process, and physical evidence. In addition, these seven elements make up the marketing mix. This combination strategically places a company in the market and can be used with different levels of strength. The marketing mix is a familiar marketing strategy tool that, as you probably know, was traditionally limited to the 4 main Ps of the product, price, location and promotion.
It is one of the 3 best classic marketing models according to a survey conducted in Smart Insights. Free essential marketing models Our free guide details 15 classic planning tools that will help you use data and analysis to develop your marketing strategy. Access the marketing models essential to business growth The 7P marketing model was originally devised by E. Jerome McCarthy and published in 1960 in his book Basic Marketing.
Over the years, theories age and people develop new frameworks. But the Marketing Mix has been on the market for almost 70 years. And yet, young salespeople, even today, are taught this as the alphabets of marketing. During this reading, I want you to keep your conscience alert at all times as a consumer.
We will learn the 7 P's of Marketing Mix with examples from our own lives and some from the industry. We will try to focus on the service sector, which was the main reason for the adoption of the 7 P's of Marketing Mix. When do companies get those benefits? It's when your product or service sells, it actually sells better than others. How can companies sell better? When the customer connects to your product or service.
With this in mind, we can now define the marketing mix as the set of guiding variables that help a company develop products and services taking into account the target market. The marketing mix traditionally had 4 points: product, location, price and promotions. However, they were found to be inadequate when it came to services, leading to an expansion of the marketing mix or the 7 P's of service marketing. But what was inappropriate? How are services different from products? In reality, a product can be felt, it is physically present.
Several product features, such as color, shape and style, can cause emotions. Customers really know what they're buying. The first image is a menu from an Asian restaurant. They have placed such colorful and realistic images on their menu, that it's as if you could see your plate of food before ordering it.
The second image shows the Japanese practice of displaying plastic replicas of their plates to attract customers. Services have no distinctions based on time and space. The service provider performs the dual role of production and service delivery. If you think about it, the customer is usually part of the process of producing a service.
Aren't you part of the service production process? This causes customers to participate equally, and in that case, poor customer execution of tasks can cause an overall poor service experience. Just like you can store products, it's impossible to store services for later sale. A product is manufactured with standard operating procedures and undergoes several mechanized and manual quality inspections. Any particular product will look the same even after millions of production units.
Due to the differences described between products and services and their implications, the 7 P's of Marketing Mix were developed. The additional 3 Ps (People, Process and Physical Evidence) seek to address the shortcomings of the traditional marketing mix. In simple terms, what is sold to the customer is the product. It is the “core” offered to the customer.
Service products are intangible, meaning that the customer must try the service once before selecting or refusing a particular vendor. Just take a look at the type of options offered even by a traditional industry such as banking. This is how companies target their target markets and offer products and services that meet their needs. The price of products is something logical, in the sense that you can see tangible material goods in front of you and you can, with a little help, calculate the approximate cost of the product.
The pricing of services is not as objective as that of goods. Companies base their prices on the customer's perception of the brand and also the competitors' pricing strategy. The goal of Place is to make your products or services available to the right customers, in the right place at the right time. Place is a very important element in the 7 P's of the marketing mix.
For most routine services, customers want to stay in their locality and avoid traveling to faraway places. It's only for those highly specialized services, such as visiting a doctor, so you'll have the trouble of traveling miles. It's important to consider where your customers will search for your products or services, where they will spend most of their time, and then decide on your place or medium of distribution. Exclusive distribution is preferred for products and services that are sought after by customers because of their uniqueness.
Services such as surgery and exclusive meals are available in limited places. Promotion, in simple terms, is the tactic used by companies to make their customers aware of their product, build their brand image and sell to their customers at retail. Promotion is once again a very strategic element because, on the one hand, you want your target customers to know your product or service, but, on the other hand, you are under pressure from The Invisible Hand: restrictions on promotion costs. Market segmentation goes a long way in knowing who your customer is and then you can effectively promote them.
The communication mix is made up of advertisements, sales promotions, direct sales, advertising, etc. The question is: how is it unique to promoting services?. We have already established that services are intangible, posing a greater risk for customers to doubt the services. Therefore, employing, training, and retaining the right group of people becomes imperative for the success of a service company.
Think about that vacation when you booked a hotel online and arrived at the place first thing in the morning. You're in a whole new city and you're carrying heavy baggage with you. Finding the hotel is a struggle in and of itself, and when you get there, you have to wait in the living room for a while because, apparently, your room has just been vacant. That brings us to the last element of the 7 P's of Marketing Mix.
The marketing strategy should be used if companies want to reach their customers faster than their competitors can achieve. And the 7 P's of the marketing mix help them do just that. Marketing helps a company align its products or services with customer needs and make them reach its customers in the right place at the right price. Of course, you must plan your processes in a way that minimizes costs on your part while maximizing benefits and value for your customer.
Pricing has a huge impact on the success of your business and can affect your marketing strategy, sales and product demand. Jerome McCarthy refined Borden's ideas and created the 4 P's of marketing (price, product, place and promotion). The Dr. Hanlon has experience in the strategic application of social networks for companies and in the transition from digitalization to digitalization and digital transformation for companies.
Consider doing a SWOT analysis regularly so you can dive deeper into your own tactics and market competition. Digital methods include email marketing, social media promotion, content marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), mobile marketing, and paid advertising. An effective marketing combination is evidence-based, synchronizes perfectly, and reflects a deep understanding of how your audience interacts with your brand. It's what awakens your customer's five senses and, first of all, creates the desire to buy.
You may need to change prices, terms of sale, include free items, or group things together to breathe new life into a product. A speech by marketing specialist Neil Borden in the 1950s was the first time the term “marketing mix” was used. . .
