What Is a Marketing Mix? Your Quick Reference to the 4 Ps of Marketing

What is a marketing mix?

A marketing mix is a combination of strategies and tactics that businesses use to promote their products or services, including product, price, place, and promotion.

What is a marketing mix? Learn the basic elements of a marketing strategy by watching the video (or reading the transcript) below.

Transcript:

Product. Price. Place. Promotion. These four Ps describe the core elements of a marketing mix.

They also describe one of the first lessons you’ll learn in a marketing class. Dust off those beat-up textbooks, because I’m about to take you back to school.

What is a marketing mix?

So, I told you the elements of a marketing mix: product, price, place, and promotion. You’ll hear a lot about those in this video.

You can describe the marketing mix as a strategic way of selling products or services to your audience.

The 4 Ps I keep mentioning play an important role in how you get a product or service from your business to your customers.

At the core of each P element — product, price, place, and promotion, if you haven’t heard — there’s the understanding that what you offer will meet your audience’s needs.

If you aren’t selling with a particular customer in mind, then you might as well not be selling at all. You have to know your audience — their shopping habits, their interests, and their challenges — to put together a marketing mix that drives revenue.

I’ll break down each P in the marketing mix so you gain a better understanding of how this all works.

The 4 Ps in marketing

All of the elements in your marketing mix influence each other while also being influenced by the outside world, but one element in particular is a sort of foundation to everything else.

1. Product

Without a product (or service), there’s no price, place, or promotion. This element refers to what you sell to your audience.

The product element requires you to know how your offerings will impact your customers’ daily lives. You’ll want to be familiar with the benefits and features that make your business unique so you know how to promote yourself and grow — maybe even expanding your offerings as you learn more about what makes your audience tick. Let me share a couple of marketing mix examples.

Say you sell necklaces. You survey your audience to see what additional items they want you to sell, and you get feedback that asks for jewelry sets. Maybe you start selling matching bracelets that complement your necklaces.

If you run a service business, like a construction company, maybe you originally focused on basement renovations. After a while, you start to get requests for bathroom renovations. If you think it’ll benefit your business and potential clients — and you have the ability to add a new  service — you can expand to bathrooms.

2. Price

The price of your offerings really depends on the environment in which you sell them, including how much people want to pay, how much you want to make from your sales, and the cost of supplies and materials. Price is certainly not set in stone.

The competitive landscape also impacts the price you set.

Here’s another marketing mix example. If you and a nearby competitor offer high-quality shoe repair services, a lower price may be what draws people to you rather than that expensive dude down the street.

And sometimes, if people see a lot of value in what you offer, they may be willing to pay more for it.

3. Place

Place refers to where you sell your products and services.

You can choose between a physical store, online store, or both. That choice is up to you, although I’d recommend adding an online element to your marketing if you don’t have one.

Your audience’s characteristics will likely change from physical location to physical location. This impacts your price, how you promote your business, and quite possibly what you sell.

Just look toward any international fast food chain for marketing mix examples. While they may have a consistent brand in different countries, the menu will change based on the eating habits of its customers.

Starbucks, Subway, Taco Bell, and McDonald’s are a few examples of fast food restaurants that adapt their menus to their locations.

4. Promotion

Promotion means the actions you take to get your business, products, or services in front of customers and potential customers. Basically, it’s advertising.

This goes beyond radio and television commercials. Investing in search engine optimization or SEO services, content marketing, social media marketing, and digital advertising are just a few ways you can promote your business.

Your promotional efforts should change based on where you sell, the cost of what you sell, your product or service capabilities, and the overall competitive landscape surrounding your business.

Again, each element of the marketing mix has an impact on the others, and all of them will fluctuate based on the environment you sell in. Often — as much as you’d like to — you can’t control the factors that impact the marketing mix, like the cost of production materials increasing or a competitor moving next door to your business.

What you can do is adapt your marketing strategy to lessen the overall impact the environment has on your business.

Want to learn how you can take each element of the marketing mix and make it work for your business?

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