You’ve got a product. You’re ready to bring it to market (or maybe you already have). Now it’s time for the fun part—marketing. But how the heck will you stand out? The answer lies in the marketing mix.
Like a solid trail mix, the marketing mix incorporates different elements to give your product the flavor of differentiation. This guide will walk you through everything you need to know about the four Ps of marketing (the OG marketing mix), as well as new variations like the five Ps, seven Ps, and five C’s.
The marketing mix refers to the set of marketing tools—traditionally the four Ps of marketing—that a company uses to differentiate its product or service in the market. It’s a valuable framework because when you find the right mix of product, place, price, and promotion (the 4Ps), your marketing efforts can most effectively help you achieve business objectives and customer needs.
The term “marketing mix” was first coined by Neil Borden in the 1950s. Inspired by the work of James Culliton, who described the marketing manager as a "mixer of ingredients," Borden argued that if a company identified all the ingredients within its control, it could influence demand for its product or service within the market. The concept was later refined into the four Ps of marketing.
The four Ps of marketing include product, price, place, and promotion. While you might think you already know what that means, each of the Ps has a specific definition within the framework of the 4Ps.
Product: What a company sells. This could be a tangible good, services, or digital products. The “Product” P includes the quality, design, features, branding, and any unique selling propositions of the product.
Price: How much the product or service costs. Pricing strategy varies depending on the market, competition, cost of production, and perceived value by the customer. This P also considers discounts, financing, and leasing options.
Place: Where and how the product is sold. Place includes the distribution channels used to reach the customer, whether it’s in physical stores, online, direct sales, or through third-party retailers. The fourth P also involves logistics, warehouse management, and the geographical location of target markets.
Promotion: Promotion refers to the strategies used to communicate with your target customer about the product or service. Promotion includes advertising, sales promotions, public relations, direct marketing, digital marketing (social media, SEO, influencer marketing, etc) and personal selling. The goal of the fifth P is to inform, persuade, and remind potential customers about the product, influencing their perceptions positively.
When deciding how to balance the four Ps in your marketing mix, you’ll want to consider market conditions, technological advances (looking at you, AI), customer preferences, and the organization’s business objectives.
Okay, but what does any of that mean in practice? Shortest answer: it depends. Part of what makes the four Ps such an enduring marketing framework is how flexible it can be. Here are some examples of the ways you can leverage the four Ps to create a rock-solid marketing plan (and drive revenue).
You may be at the “idea” stage of your product, or you may have an established product/service. Either way, your marketing planning will benefit from the marketing team getting crystal clear on the product. You should be able to answer each of these questions. If you can’t, start by spending some time on them.
What is your product in the simplest, most concrete terms?
What does your target customer need?
How does your product (or service) solve the problem your target audience is facing?
How is your product (or service) different from your competitors?
Here’s an example of what you don’t want to do. “Twilio SendGrid is a SaaS that enhances customers' ability to convert and market.” It’s a whole bunch of words that are technically true and sound impressive when strung together, but they’re not clear. Instead, you want your answers to look something like this.
Twilio SendGrid is an email marketing tool that makes it easy for companies to design emails, manage email cadence, and track email marketing performance.
Twilio SendGrid’s target customer needs a tool that makes email marketing simple and effective.
Twilio The SendGrid Marketing Cloud provides content management and contact management. With an easy-to-use design, SendGrid helps customers scale and optimize their email marketing programs.
Twilio SendGrid sets itself apart from the email-SaaS crowd with 27/7 support, expert guidance, and tools to optimize your inbox delivery rate.
Part of the marketing mix's beauty is that it can help you find the “goldilocks” price for your product or service. Your price should be based on the value your product or service offers (product), what it costs to produce/sell (place), marketing overhead (promotion), etc.
These questions can help you determine the best price for your product/service:
What costs does your sale price need to cover (COGS, staff, distribution, packaging, retail space, etc)?
What would your target market be willing to pay for your product?
Whether your product is a physical good that will be sold in stores (your own or other retailers) or a digital download that will be sold online (on your own website or a marketplace), finding the right place will affect your success. Finding the perfect place for your specific product requires you to consider the other Ps. For example, selling on a marketplace or through retailers cuts into your profit margin, so you have to look at your price and see if that works. Launching a retail footprint comes with increased overhead, which can also affect your margin. Selling through your own website, on the other hand, may require more marketing (aka promotion).
These questions can help you determining the right place for your product or service:
What are your target market’s purchasing habits?
How will different channels impact your profit margin?
Do you need sales to explain/demonstrate the project at the point of sale?
We’ve finally reached the marketing in marketing mix. Where you land on your product, price, and place should impact your marketing strategy. You won’t be able to do it all, so this is where you want to use the other Ps to edit your options to choose the channels (email marketing, influencer marketing, SEO, SEM, social media, etc) to focus on.
Start with these questions to help you get clear on your marketing objectives:
What demographic is your target audience?
What behaviors does your target audience have that may affect their engagement with your promotions?
How are your competitors marketing their products/services?
The market landscape has changed radically since the concept of the four Ps became a foundational marketing concept. In recent years, there has been criticism that the original framework—while still relevant—falls a bit short when it comes to holistically assessing business challenges and what’s needed for a successful marketing mix. As a result, we’ve seen several twists on the original.
In addition to the original Ps (product, price, place, and promotion), the five P framework includes “people” as the fifth P. “People” includes salespeople, customer service representatives, and all other customer-facing personnel. This addition was deemed important because the skills, attitudes, and performance of customer-facing employees can significantly impact the perception of the brand and the effectiveness of the product's marketing.
The seven P framework goes even further, accounting for the increasing importance of brand experience and speed/convenience (thank you very much to an unnamed ecommerce giant for setting our delivery expectations very high).
In addition to the four Ps (people, product, price, and promotion), the seven Ps include:
People: All the people who impact the customer experience—from sales to customer service.
Process: A business’s delivery and operating systems that affect the customer experience.
Physical evidence: The retail footprint, store experience, packaging (from product packaging to shipping boxes).
The five Cs provide another framework for developing a successful marketing strategy—one that’s focused more on external factors. The five Cs include:
Customer: Know your target audience and what they need, want, how they behave, and what affects their buying decisions.
Company: What are your business’s strengths and weaknesses? How are you positioned in the market relative to your competitors?
Competitors: Understand your biggest competitors. What are their strengths and weaknesses? What strategies are they using to target your audience?
Collaborators: These are potential partners (suppliers, distributors, and strategic partners) who can help you meet your business objectives.
Context: Context includes macro-environmental factors like politics, market trends, the economy, and other external factors that could affect consumer behavior and market opportunities.
Get the most out of your marketing mix with an email marketing platform designed for performance. Twilio SendGrid makes it easy to customize and design emails, grow your email lists, organize contacts, increase your inbox delivery rate (aka sidestep the dreaded spam filter), and track email marketing performance.
