Blog 10

An important concept I perceived to be the most effective in the course throughout the semester were the four P’s of marketing. Without understanding how to utilize product, price, place, and promotion your business will struggle to be successful.

• Product is defined as an item that will satisfy a consumer. There are many things that come with a product. The package, brand, and physical product itself. The package needs to be safe, preserving, and convenient. The brand is what your product represents. Branding leads to customer loyalty and separates a company from the competition.

• Promotion is the technique a firm uses to communicate information about a product. Promotions creates the image of what the company wants their product to portray. You can market a product to many channel such as social media, television, radio and many others. In the promotion stage you are able to present your brand to the consumers. A promotion can change a persons behavior and emotions and can be very influential in the purchase decision.

• Place is where and who the product or service is going to be sold to. There are many channels businesses can distribute their product to such as, online, retail, wholesale, and direct to consumer. The goal is to get your product into the right market, at the correct price, and at the right time compared to your competitors. It's critical to make sure a business markets and distributes their products in the most efficient locations. For example, expensive car dealerships are located in wealthy towns, because a person living in the suburbs would never be able to afford that product.

• Finally price can be the most influential out of all the four P’s in the marketing mix. A products price determines where it will be placed in the market. Prices are determined from competitors in the the market. There are many ways for a product to be priced to enter a market. Predominantly the two price methods used are price skimming and penetration pricing. Price skimming is the pricing strategy where businesses will set a high initial price for a product and then lower it over time. In contrast penetration pricing, which is when a product is priced low initially in order to attract customers away from competitors.

Using the marketing mix is the best approach while conducting our class practice marketing simulation. Our teams goal in the simulation was to design a cool desired pack that is environmentally friendly for college students to buy. After a few turns we were able to analyze the market and see what demographic the most units were being sold to, and in which markets. It was clear that the Urban commuters purchased the most backpacks in the market. Using the data, we decided to change our product and reposition it into the urban commuters market. We strategically used the marketing mix to change the product, distribution, target market, and price in order to gain share in the market. Without knowledge of how the four P’s work in marketing, we would never have decided to change the product. The end result of the repositioning was a huge success bringing our team into second place and skyrocketing our profit margins.