Business schools would traditionally teach you The Marketing Mix comprising of the 4Ps: Product, Price, Place and Promotion. However, in this new world of business, it encompasses of 3 more Ps for a complete Marketing Mix but before we get into that, lets go through the first 4Ps that we have all learnt.
Product
Essentially what you are selling. The item or service. It doesn’t have to be the best in the market, it just needs to be better than what is already available in the market currently.
Price & Place
To put the right price to your product. You need a bit of economics (this is why you learn the crazy econs in business school) as well as the next P, Place.
In a place where your product is not in demand, it may not even sell or even if it sells, it has to be sold at a really low price to attract people to buy.
In a place where your product is high in demand, you can price the product a bit better by controlling your supply. Like in Singapore, housing prices are high because it is high in demand but low in supply. But in bigger countries with more land and the proportion of people to space is larger, housing prices are low because demand is low but it has a huge surplus of land/houses.
Promotion
Last but not least, the last P.
Working on this last P is where the 3 new Ps also come into place and here’s what they are: Psychology, People and Passion.
To develop a good Promotion, the company needs to understand the Psychology of the consumers. This is where the research team comes in to perform a Quantitative and Qualitative data research and analysis, to find out what are the needs of the people, what do they watch, what do they read, where do they get their information from and what are their motivations to make a purchase.
Then, to promote, the company needs to hire the right People with the Passion to connect with other people and sell using Psychology. This can come in two key forms; Advertising and Sales Team.
In Advertising, the team would need to establish the best outreach method to get the product out to as many people as possible. Having an awesome product in the right country with a major need for it still won’t sell because no one knows. So, the job of the advertising team is to develop content strategy based on the needs of the people, their habits of receiving information and motivations to buy and eventually come up with a Newspaper Advert, Radio Advert, TV Advert or Billboard or whatever that fits best into the Place.
In Sales, the team needs to bring in people who are good at interpersonal relationships to do the same thing as what the advertisers and research team has done – to assess the needs, motivations of the potential buyers and to suggest/recommend the product and to position the product in the capacity that would best meet those needs shared earlier.
And of course, Passion is important because without it, how is it to sustain?
So, there you have it, the New Marketing Mix:
Product, Price, Place, Promotion, Psychology, People and Passion