Marketing Mix – The 4-D Game

Image of 3-D chess game Essentially the ‘Marketing Mix’ is how a company positions a product in the marketplace – but since a company usually has lots of products and no one product is completely independent from a company it’s easier to think of ‘Marketing Mix’ as the constantly adjusting angles from which a company both positions itself to take advantage of the marketplace and to help its customers.

Conventionally …

The conventional marketing mix (the four P’s) goes something like this (1):

Product (features, presentation, brand etc.)
Pricing (base price, special offers, hire-purchase etc.)
Promotion (salesmen and saleswomen, advertising, PR etc.)
Place (channels – the equivalent of networks of affiliates – physical distribution, dealer support etc.)

Onto this have been tacked a few more P’s, particularly in relation to services (plumbing, hairdressing etc.):

People (staff motivation, allocation of roles etc.)
Process (the standardised customer experience)
Physical Evidence (something tangible offered as a result of an (often invisible) transaction)

A few more P’s …

Consider, however, the following:

Mike owns a small business. What sets him apart from his competition is Passion (another ‘P’). Passion gets him travelling to trade shows, participating in events related to his product and on the bleeding edge of what’s hot and upcoming. Customers flock to him. Because of passion his business has the latest products and Mike knows how to communicate with his customers.
Jenny’s business involves the manufacture of toys. Fortunately she has a few children of her own (and a home Dad ) and her friends and relatives have kids. The kids help keep her attuned to the world of toys. Family life is a small part of her marketing mix because it keeps her in touch with her market and affects the decisions she makes. So let’s add another ‘P’, Personal.
Sam has a disabled mother. Each day she takes her mother to a day-care centre, and each day she trails back home to run her small business. Patience is a trait she’s had to develop. It affects the way she’s positioning her company. Let’s add another ‘P’ – Psychology.

So we can now add Passion, Personal and Psychology to the Marketing Mix.

The 4 C’s …

Relatively recently there’s been a shift away from ‘push marketing’ towards ‘pull marketing’, with the consumer taking the driving seat (2), leading to the four C’s concept of the ‘Marketing Mix’:

Customers (their needs and wants – they have to want what you’re selling)
Cost (working backwards from how much a product will cost a customer e.g. product maintenance, product accessories, upgrades etc.)
Convenience (how easy is it for the customer to get hold of the product e.g. the time it takes, the distance travelled)
Communication (building a better relationship with customers through listening … )

The limits of ‘Marketing Mix’

‘Marketing Mix’ is a very fluid concept but the risk in using the term is that it constrains our world view. Words are symbols that help us make sense of the world, and we have to be careful what symbols we choose. ‘Marketing Mix’ means nothing until the underlying structure (above) has been learnt, and then it triggers off that structure and limits our world view.

Unconventionally …

Is there an alternative way of looking at a company’s ‘Marketing Mix’?

A ‘Marketing Mix’ isn’t two-dimensional – it’s four-dimensional (timing is probably somewhere in the ten ‘P’s because timing is involved in introducing a product, changing it’s pricing and updating it etc.) and is really a set of feelings, insights, pictures and intuitions that are the result of a company-insider’s wide knowledge, deep experience and hours and hours of obsessive thinking and analysis.
A better way of thinking of ‘Marketing Mix’ is to redefine it as a dance, or a game of wits or strategy. It demands a visceral way of thinking. Perhaps in-house marketers should use their own private symbols (words) based on their own experiences of life to make sense of it. The competitive yachtswoman might relate to positioning a product in a different way to the semi-professional jazz musician, for example – one might think in terms of three-dimensional angles, forces and competitive pressures, the other in terms of cooperation (perhaps), whilst both will have their own versions of being ‘in the zone’, timing and intuition.
Positioning a product or a company isn’t for the disinterested – it’s for the passionate, experienced and fascinated working within a company and for those (ideally) with both intuitive and analytical skills.

A crude tool

Whilst the concept of ‘Marketing Mix’ is useful as a crude tool it’s also limiting. It’s the equivalent of corporate-speak, reducing everything down to its lowest common denominator, useful for getting an initial snapshot but then to be thrown away. A far better method is to be fascinated and absorbed by what your company does.

(1) Peter Doyle, Marketing Management and Strategy
(2) http://www.scs.unr.edu/~khalilah/eMarketing.pdf