Introduction to Marketing and Strategy Planning
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Introduction to Marketing and Strategy Planning
Sample Syllabus
Sample Lesson
    1. Introduction to Marketing and Strategy Planning
    2. Introduction and Objectives
    3. Lesson Road Map
    4. What is Marketing?
    5. Importance of Customer Satisfaction
    6. The Marketing Concept and Marketing Orientation
    7. Elements of Customer-Driven Marketing Strategy
    8. Four Ps of a Marketing Mix
    9. Competitive Advantage and Differentiation
    10. Social Responsibility and Marketing Ethics
    11. Concluding Remarks
    12. Activities

Four Ps of a Marketing Mix

You can probably appreciate that the needs of the target customers can be filled in a number of different ways.

Therefore, in the process of satisfying customer needs, there are few controllable marketing tools available for the marketers who could blend these elements in a way to produce the customer response. These controllable tools are called the marketing mix or the four Ps of marketing:

  1. Product (any offerings of the firm that satisfy customer needs)
  2. Price (value customers pay to obtain product to satisfy their needs)
  3. Place (distribution or making products available to customers)
  4. Promotion (communicating the benefits of the product and persuading customers to buy)

So, it's the job of marketing management to blend these four elements together in a way to elicit customer response. For example, a new product with a very low promotion budget probably won't succeed and most consumers will reject a "no-frills" product with a high price. Most marketing decisions depend on the careful integration of the marketing mix.

In practice you may also hear the term supply chain management used instead of "Place" and Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) used instead of "Promotion."