The marketing mix is not a new concept – it was first created by Jerome McCarthy in 1960 and consisted of the 4 Ps of marketing; Product, Price, Place and Promotion. Then in 1981, Booms & Bitner added three more Ps to the marketing mix; People, Processes and Physical evidence and these 7 Ps are now the set of key principles that are at the heart of all marketing strategies…often just referred to as the ‘Marketing Mix’.
How do the 7 Ps work?
If we look at all of the Ps, one at a time, you will have a better understanding of basic marketing theory and a great foundation with which to pull together your marketing strategy.
The 7 Ps of marketing are a set of key principles that belong at the very heart of your marketing strategy. They are sometimes jointly referred to as the marketing mix.
The starting point, as most marketers know, when pulling together a marketing strategy is to identify your target market, so you know who your customers are, what they like and dislike and what makes them tick. Once you know this, you can look at the 7 Ps.
Product
Every product you sell, make, produce or think about making should have your customer at the very heart. It should solve a problem for them, or be something they need or want. It’s worth asking yourself, ‘What is it about my product that makes your customers want to buy it?’ Do you need to change or tweak your products in any way to meet your customers’ needs?
Your products should also be of good quality, and the research that you have done on your target market will give you the information you need to know about their tastes and their buying habits, so you can market your product in the best way possible to get the most sales.
Price
There are lots of different things to consider when setting your price for a particular product or service you provide. Obviously it needs to be deemed as good value for money by your customers, but you need to take into consideration the costs of producing, promoting and delivering your product.
You also have to take the cost of a similar product that is sold by your competitors. Finding the right price for your goods is not just about undercutting the competition or offering a cheaper alternative. It’s about finding out, during your market research, what price your customer is willing or used to paying for products or services that are similar to yours.
For example, when you go to the supermarket to buy shampoo, whether you’re aware of it or not, you will probably buy a brand that is in what you consider to be in your price range. But, at the same time, you’ll probably look at other similar products on the shelf and are likely to try something outside of your habitual price range, just to try it…even though a cheaper alternative might be available! So, people don’t always go for the cheapest option.
Place
Your product should be where your customers expect to find it. So where and how are you going to sell your products? Do you sell them yourself or outsource them to retail outlets? Do you sell from home via an online shop, sell online from your own website, or do you put them on a big selling website like Amazon? You might be a small concern and sell via party plan or on Social Media sites. It might be a combination of several ways.
Whichever way you choose, it must be where your customers will expect to find your products, and you need to take into account the shelf life of your products, so if you stock them yourself, you don’t find yourself with hundreds of products coming to the end of their shelf life and you can’t shift them.
Promotion
This links into the place because, just as you need to put your product where potential customers can find it, you need to think about how you will let them know about your products through advertising. And it needs to be where they will look and also what they look for. For example:
- Social Media sites
- Content marketing
- Influencer marketing
- Promotions and campaigns
- Exhibitions or trade stands
- PR
- Direct mail
- Personal selling
- Advertising in newspapers, magazines, on radio etc.
People
This refers to the people who get your products out in the public eye, which includes you! Anyone who you employ or enlist help from to promote your business, or deliver a promotion or campaign need to have the necessary skills, qualities and drive to ensure its success.
You, and they, need to have excellent communication skills and deliver excellent customer service. After all, this is your reputation at stake and how you and anyone you employ behaves, impacts the way your customers will perceive you and your brand. You might need to delegate some of the work to a Social Media Manager, for example, who will know when and how to promote, and importantly, what will work best for your business. So, you need people around you who are like-minded, will effectively market your brand and encourage customers to spread the word about your products or services. And, never forget to keep learning and training yourself and your employees to develop new and relevant skills that will further enhance your business.
Process
The processes are what is involved in delivering your products to your customers. How your products are delivered will have a huge impact on the overall customer experience, their satisfaction levels and whether they will be loyal to your business in future. It’s absolutely vital to get this right from the very start.
Processes include:
- Website experience – is your website easy to navigate? Are your contact details in a prominent or obvious place so you are easy to do business with?
- Delivery time – do you have a good delivery process? Is it reliable? Does your website and product description (if selling online), tell people about delivery times and what they should expect?
- If your products are in a physical shop, what are the waiting times? Do they have to pre-order or can they just find the product in stock and in-store?
- Aftercare – this is important too. Do you follow up after a sale to ask if the customer is happy with the product? If you do, and they are happy with your product, ask for a review to be left on your website or social media pages, or ask them to recommend their friends and family. You could even offer a 10% discount off their next purchase if they recommend you and that person buys from you.
Physical evidence
Finally, the last P, is physical evidence. This refers to absolutely everything that your customers see and feel when interacting with your business. From the feelings your customers have when visiting a physical environment, such as a shop or office, to the area where you show your products or services, which may be online.
It cover all the physical equipment, such as invoices, receipts, confirmation emails, ‘thank-you’ cards, packaging and branding. All of these things make up the impression that customers will have at every stage of an interaction with you and your company or brand. People expect excellence in every aspect of business and they should get the quality and service that they expect…and of those that are set as industry standards.
It also includes how you act and relate to your customers. Are you awkward and aloof, or relaxed and friendly?
All these factors contribute to the overall customer experience, so make sure that your customers have a great one!
Benefits of using the 7 Ps in your marketing planning
The 7 Ps gives you a fantastic framework for your marketing planning. It will help you do a thorough job, so for each product you sell, or service you provide, ensure that each one follows the best practices of the 7 Ps. After all, it is referred to as the ‘Marketing Mix’ – it is the right marketing mix to put in place to make sure that each campaign, each project, each product will be successful. The 7Ps can also help you look at previous projects or campaigns that were not successful. I’m sure you’ll find that they weren’t in line with the 7Ps.
As I said at the very beginning of this article, the 7 Ps are a set of key principles that are at the heart of all marketing strategies. They help make the different between instinct-led marketing and process-led marketing, which in most cases is a more sure-fire way to success.
I hope this article has helped you to understand how the 7 Ps fit in and why they are such an important part of marketing theory. Let me know what you thought about this article in the comments below.
comments and respond to any reviews you get. You can also connect with influencers related to your content – like and share their content, make comments on their pages. If you belong to groups relating to your niche, take part in conversations, give advice, answer questions – interact with people. Your responses and interaction help social media algorithms recognise that your content is active, which in turn, improves its reach. And KEEP POSTING – social media moves very quickly and it’s easy for posts to get lost among all the others.
The main reason is so that your business is showing up where your potential customers are….i.e. online! If someone is searching the internet for something that you sell, at some point they will come across your website. A website is like your shop front…but it is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It sells your products or services even when you’re asleep, on holiday or otherwise engaged. So you could be missing out on potential business if you don’t have one. And with loads of different website-building platforms to choose from, that have online tutorials and community based support, it’s a fairly easy process.
seven days a week. If you combine your website with a blog or newsletter, your customers can see when you have special offers and new products.
It’s very important to first of all choose the right domain name for your website because you will hopefully have it for a long time and it becomes part of your branding. You might want to have a domain that is your name.
important to do just that. If they can’t find what they want on your site, they can click away and choose someone else.
Search engines, such as Google, are what brings traffic to your website, so you need to ‘optimize’ your site. It’s important to add keywords or phrases in your headings, text, URL and Meta descriptions. For more information on SEO, click here.
what your competitors do…you can then get an idea of what you’d like your site to look like. If you have a logo, the colours, font and style of your logo will determine the design of your website, so that everything is consistent.
Nowadays, most businesses, even very small businesses, have an online presence – be it a website, social media page or advert. Because of the internet, small businesses are not limited to local business; we can sell worldwide and reach millions of people at the click of a mouse…and businesses are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Although this is fabulous, in that you can reach millions of potential customers, it’s harder to manage your business’s reputation. If someone has left a negative comment somewhere on the web, you won’t always see it, but it can be just as damaging as a word of mouth negative remark. So how do you manage your online reputation?
also various events I was involved in years ago when I was employed in the UK. Also try entering your name into google images – that surprised me too!
completely active on them all the time, but if you add content once a month, this can help your online reputation. As well as the usual sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram, there is also Tumblr, Pinterest and YouTube, which are great channels to be a part of. I belong to a few of them, but am mainly active on Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and YouTube. One of my goals for this year is to be more active on these and a couple of other sites…even if only adding the odd article or adding a comment to something and why it is interesting to me.
your friends can see them. There is still a problem with this as social media sites are always changing their rules and regulations, so you can’t be sure that privacy settings are really private…or will be in future. I always used to tell my children when they were teenagers – don’t post anything that you wouldn’t mind your grandparents seeing or, for that matter, the whole wide world! After all, it is the World Wide Web!
However, there will always be the odd person who will give you a bad review or say something negative about you or your business. This is not necessarily a bad thing; the knee jerk reaction is to delete negative comments, but in reality, if you can address the problem publicly, taking a proactive 
approach, apologising if necessary and offering alternative products or solutions…or asking the person making the comment to suggest how you can address the problem. Often, this shows you listen to your customers and take action, which can only show you in good light. The worst thing you can do is to ignore it and hope it will go away, or delete it. My advice would be to always reply and try and address any issues. Often this turns a negative into a positive.
build your business.
OK, so you’ve tested whether you can be found, you’ve registered your business to make it easier to be found in search engines. Now you need to look at your website and ensure you have the right keywords and phrases in place.
If you are a creative person, you may find that everyday jobs like email, accounts, taxes, marketing, social media or marketing, a distraction from what you want to be focussing on. Hiring someone to do those jobs for you is a great option, and hiring in an expert gives you peace of mind that everything will be done to a high standard and you can stop worrying about it.
Running your own business can be very isolating and this can be depressing if you were previously used to working in a busy environment. There are always local groups of small businesses who get together to network, have lunch and generally chat about their businesses. Join some of those groups and meet other people … it’s highly motivating to talk to someone who is enthusiastic about what they do and that energy is contagious and will help you to revive your excitement about your business.
When you’re first in business, it’s like being in love. Exhilarating, exciting, stimulating. Then, after a while, it might feel like your business is losing its appeal, it’s become humdrum and a bit boring, as reality of day to day life sets in. It’s hard work and maybe not as financially rewarding as you hoped…and it makes you tired and irritable.
So what’s the secret to rekindling the love for your business? Remind yourself of all the good things…make a list of all that’s good about your business, the positive things it brings you. What really matters to you and what ignited that spark to be in business in the first time? And finally, never lose hope, being in business for yourself isn’t a bed of roses, but with a little bit of patience and effort, you can learn to love it again and keep it alive and kicking.
I came across an article online the other day about a slimming club. It gave the most amazing stories about people who had lost a lot of weight by changing the way they think about food. Then it occurred to me that this mind-set could apply to marketing. We’re all guilty of thinking that the hill is impossible to climb and that, in itself, puts obstacles in our way.
the Marketing and Communications department, I wanted to go for a promotion. In a meeting with my boss, she told me that if I wanted to go further and get my next grade, I needed to act like I already had that grade. So I looked at the criteria for the next grade and started learning how to do some of things that required and started acting like I was doing the job. After a relatively short time, I was promoted – my behaviours had changed and, instead of sitting there wishing I was the next grade up, I worked and thought as if I was already there. Applying this to small businesses, by learning the right marketing behaviours and practicing them, over time you will become more successful at marketing.
You may find someone or a few people who you could collaborate with. For example if you’re a hairdresser, you might want to team up with a make-up artist, so you can pull together a package for weddings or prom events. You can put a link to their website on yours and vice versa.
If you’re a blogger, arrange to interview an influential person in your niche…someone who is an expert or leading authority on the kind of thing you do. You could interview them as a podcast or use it for a blog post. Either way, once published, that person will tell his/her contacts about the interview and point them to it…and you will get more traffic to your blog/website and the possibility of them using your products or services.
The Write Way 