In the blog this week we’ll look at where to start when marketing your product or service. So let’s look at those cornerstones we talked about last week, the fundamentals of marketing – the marketing mix.

For a product this means what is commonly referred to as the 4 P’s:

• Product (what are you marketing?)
• Price (what are you selling it for?)
• Place (where do you sell it?)
• Promotion (how to attract your customers attention)

These are all great if you are selling a product, something physical that your customer can touch, feel and smell, a great example would be a chocolate bar. When you’ve decided which delicious treat to buy, you pay your money and walk away with it in your hand (for all of 2 minutes probably before it’s gone!). If you are offering a service, the mix alters and it becomes the 7 P’s:

• Product
• Price
• Place
• Promotion
• People (the staff that customers interact with)
• Process (how you service the customer)
• Physical evidence (what can you give to make the service tangible)

The difficulty with marketing a service is that the customer cannot walk away with a physical ‘thing’. Let’s take a bank as an example of a service. The People element is the staff behind the counter dealing with your transaction, the Process is what happens when the service is performed; is it consistent? When you pay your money in does the same thing happen each time, if it doesn’t do you trust it? The Physical evidence is the cheque book, bank card, statement and branch that you visit. They make you feel confident that your money is there for you when you go to the atm. You can google the marketing mix and may get several different variations on how many P’s there are. Personally I’d recommend you stick with the two variants above, it will be much easier for you to manage. So why do we need to think about the marketing mix? Every ‘P’ plays an important role in getting your product or service to market. Tip: Why not draw up a simple table and plot against each ‘P’ what your product or service has for each element. It will help you to understand what’s happening in your company and offer you some insight into what you might be able to do differently or better to improve sales. In next week’s blog we’ll take a look at objective setting, understanding the ‘Why’ better to formulate the ‘What’, ‘When’, ‘How’ and ‘Where’. Tracy