The 4-Ps

In the "real world," Public Relations and Advertising are actually known as marketing communications functions. Most people find it more convenient to define marketing in terms of the "marketing mix."

You can remember the four components of the marketing mix by listing the 4-Ps:

• Product (or increasingly
  today Service),
  which includes packaging
  design, branding, trademarks,
  warranties,
  guarantees, product life cycles
  and new
  product development

• Price, which is setting profitable and
  justifiable prices

• Place, which covers the physical
  distribution of goods

• Promotion, which encompasses public relations, advertising, personal selling and sales promotion

Marketing is much more than selling, or advertising. It encompasses everything from what products or services you sell to how you get them to the customer.

If you've studied marketing in the 40+ years since E. Jerome McCarthy originally wrote his classic Basic Marketing, then you're familiar with the 4-Ps of Marketing – or what’s known as the Marketing Mix. It's a neat and memorable classification system of the various controllable elements of marketing. Here they are, focused on a particular target market or customer:

This demonstrates that Promotion is only one quarter of the Marketing Mix. Advertising and PR are each only one quarter of the Promotional component of the marketing mix. This provides a clear view of how those two Mass Comm disciplines fit into how business is conducted today.

Marketing professionals must take considerable pains to understand and characterize the market, the target audience/customers and the environment in which they are doing business. The marketing plan identifies all controllable elements of the exchange relationship between an organization and its customers/clients. But such a marketing plan floats in a sea of uncontrollable variables.

Marketing decision variables are those variables under the firm's control that can affect the level of demand for the firm's products. They are distinguished from environmental and competitive action variables that are NOT  under the firm's control. So there are controllable variables and uncontrollable variables affecting an organization’s marketing and promotion.

• Controllable -- The 4 Ps represent elements of your marketing strategy that you can control. They depend upon such "givens" as your budget; personnel or human resources; physical resources, such as office equipment, space, etc. But you can do a lot to influence them.
• Uncontrollable -- The current economic environment includes elements such as consumer confidence, unemployment, new technologies that threaten to displace your own, competitors that suddenly appear on the horizon, government regulations thought up by your favorite controlling or anti-business political party, and changing consumer preferences. This also includes things like famine, flood or natural disasters.  You just can't control these and they can play havoc with your marketing and promotional plans.

Marketing aficionados often sniff at those who cite the 4-Ps; way too simplistic for them. To show them you really understand the concept of marketing you can toss in a couple of variations.

You can extend the number of P's --the two which are usually seen as useful additions, especially for services,  are:

• People--Good  services are not likely to be delivered by people who are unskilled or unmotivated;
• Process--The way in which the user gets hold of the service.

The second way to show your marketing knowledge is to dismiss the P's as being as old-fashioned, as so 1980s.

For example, there are the C's developed by Robert Lauterborn and put forward by Philip Kotler:

• Place becomes Convenience
• Price becomes Cost to the user
• Promotion becomes Marketing Communication
• Product becomes Customer needs and wants

These C's reflect a more client-oriented marketing philosophy. They provide useful reminders -- for example that you need to bear in mind the convenience of the client when deciding where to offer a service.

Some would argue that the marketing mix is too product-oriented, and that modern marketing should not focus on it. However, the tried-and-true, historical  4-Ps designation does provide a handy framework for marketing analysis. The C's are also not nearly so memorable as the P-words, and marketing texts still tend to use the 4-Ps to describe the elements of the mix.

The concept is simple. Think about another common mix - a cake mix. All cakes contain eggs, milk, flour, and sugar. However, you can alter the final cake by altering the amounts of mix elements contained in it. So for a sweet cake add more sugar. It is the same with the marketing mix. The Product/Price/Place you make to you customer can be altered by varying the mix elements.

There are a vast array of circumstances that will dictate which elements of the marketing mix are to be employed and in which proportion. If you have put sufficient time into accurately defining your marketplace, your market segment, your product positioning, and your unique selling propositions then it becomes much easier to carry out this task.

Taking time to think through your marketing strategy forces you to take some very difficult decisions. The most difficult ones are those where you decide NOT to do certain things; such as deciding certain market sectors are not key to your company's success due to the difficulty in competing effectively. The benefits of taking such decisions are that it really helps you to focus on a more limited (and achievable) set of objectives. It then becomes much clearer which elements of the marketing mix need to be used, and hence you achieve profitable results from your marketing budget.