Tool Box
Issue No. 48 - August/September 2009
Use the marketing mix to the max
by Rex Buckingham
Neil H. Borden popularised the term ‘marketing mix’in a landmark 1964 paper. The ingredients in Borden’s marketing mix included product planning, pricing, branding, distribution channels, personal selling, advertising, promotions, packaging, display, servicing, physical handling, and fact finding and analysis.
It was E. Jerome McCarthy who later grouped these ingredients into the four categories now known as the ƊPs’ of marketing: Product, Price, Place (distribution) and Promotion.
What a shame this limited vision was so truncated! The concept of only 4Ps misses the important and unavoidable ‘P’ of Position: where to distribute, what channel to distribute through, what actual product
to produce, what price to charge. How does an ‘product matrix’ get developed without going through the important considerations of price, quality, size, value, etc?
A product matrix is a structure for analysing product information by comparing characteristics such as color, size, material, quality, price, distribution, or any combination therein with the view of identifying opportunity or threat. When the original ‘4P’s are considered alone, the majority of effort is about price and product innovation.
Product innovation too often is brought back to price alone - what someone thinks the market can bear. Obviously true marketers look past this but in times of ‘global crisis’ there is a deafening call to ‘meet price or fail’!
‘People’ – do we need as many, doing the same job as eons ago or do we go to market with other methodologies and use people in other ways? Do we have the level of experience, product knowledge and ability to train clients to help support their own needs?
Without ‘Performance management’ we do not harness and maintain the effect and value of ‘People’. They can become more liability than asset.
‘Participation’ is about ‘buy-in’ and developing ideas beyond the value...
