Marketing 4Ps

Product

Product Portfolio is a strategic group of products the company offers to its target customers and creates value for its stakeholders. The product portfolio can be made of related products/services or groups of unrelated products/services in case of large diversified companies. Planning and developing product offerings is a critical marketing function and has long-term impact on the business performances. Ideas for new products and current products improvement comes from variety of sources such as customers, competitors, and employees. For a large portfolio of products the role of marketing managers and product managers is very important.

What goes into the product portfolio? Product offering can be anything that satisfies a need for a customer and creates benefits, solves problems, reduces costs, or offers convenience. Product offering can be traditional/tangible product, service, solution… In a competitive marketplace every business is a service business because companies try to offer extra value for their customers and help them satisfy their needs better then their competitors. As a result of that most of the time businesses offer packages of products and services in order to create appealing and competitive offering. 

Depending on the type of customer product offerings can be consumer products such as shopping products, convenience products, and specialty products and industrial products such as raw materials, installations, and professional services.

Important issues for product management are product features, branding, promotion, packaging, quality, and product life cycle.

Place 

What is the most effective and efficient way to reach the target market? Product availability which offers convenience, quality, and customer satisfaction while operating costs can be justified by the business model. Push vs. Pull strategy: push strategy sells products through traditional channels using sales force offering the products to customers while pull strategy sells products by customers looking for and ordering/buying the products driven by advertising and promotional activities. Product distribution includes storing the products, delivering the products, and communication with other channel members and customers. Examples of distribution channels are direct distribution to final users, selling and distributing through intermediaries or combination of both direct and indirect distribution. Product distribution is closely related to the sales and marketing management, examples of different sales approaches are using internal sales representatives, using external sales representatives, using dealerships, selling through wholesalers, selling through retailers, or selling online.

Promotion

What is the most effective and efficient way to communicate with the target market? Promotion includes publicity, advertising, direct selling, sales promotion, product/service discounts, public relations… Promotional activities are used to promote the company, products, services, brands, new product promotions, promoting into new markets… Depending on the promotional objectives different strategies and tactics can be applied such as promotional activities to inform the target audience, promotional activities to persuade the target audience, and promotional activities to remind the target audience. In each of these cases the overall goal is to create interest and motivate target customers to take some actions. Very effective promotion is publicity which is non-paid promotion / communication with the target market such as event management and community relationship management.   

Pricing

What is the most effective price for our products and services? Pricing decisions and policy are strategic decisions because the price charged for products and services has an impact on the marketing strategy as well as the internal company profit and cost structure. As a result of that the pricing strategy should be very well analyzed and developed based on the long-term strategy of the business. There are different pricing objectives/approaches such as introductory pricing used to promote new products and services, profit generating pricing which is used to generate maximum profit for the business, market share oriented pricing which captures market share for the company, competition oriented pricing which considers competitors’ pricing strategies, skimming price which maximizes profits from unique/new to market products and services, promotional pricing such as promoting a certain product or service, cost oriented pricing which considers the cost of goods sold and the cost of doing business as well as target markup… Pricing should also be flexible/customized if the company sells to different market/customer segments.