Introduction

What is it?

The Marketing Mix is a term used to describe the combination of tactics used by a business to achieve its objectives by marketing its products or services effectively to a particular target customer group. It is also referred to as the .4 Ps; Product, Price, Promotion and Place, or the .7 Ps; the 4 Ps with the addition of People, Process and Physical Evidence.

Why is it Important?

Businesses need to make sure they are marketing… the right product to… the right person at… the right price in… the right place and at… the right time. For example, if you manufacture pens, and have decided to target schoolchildren, it would be more appropriate to market: colored ballpoint pens (product); at a low price (price); selling them through newsagents and stationers (place); and promoting them through point of sale material (promotion) than it would be to market: gold fountain pens (product); at a high price, including insurance against loss (price); selling them through specialist outlets and jewellery stores (place); and promoting them in glossy magazines and Sunday Supplements (promotion).

Explaining 7P of Marketing

Marketing mix is the set of controllable variables and their levels that the firm uses to influence the target market. The elements of marketing mix are the basic, tactical components of a marketing plan. Also known as the Four P’s, the marketing mix elements are price, place, product, and promotion. The concept is simple. Think about another common mix - an ice-cream mix. All ice-creams contain milk, sugar, flavors. However, one can alter the final ice-cream by altering the amounts of mix elements contained in it. So for a chocolate flavor add more chocolate powder, for vanilla flavor add more vanilla powder and for bitter coffee taste add less sugar and more coffee powder!

It is the same with the marketing mix. The offer you make to your customer can be altered by varying the mix elements. So for a high profile brand, increase the focus on promotion and desensitize the weight given to price. Another way to think about the marketing mix is to use the image of an artist’s palette. The marketer mixes the prime colors (mix elements) in different quantities to deliver a particular final color. Every hand painted picture is original in some way, as is every marketing mix. Some commentators will increase the marketing mix to the Five P’s, to include people. Others will increase the mix to Seven P’s, to include physical evidence (such as uniforms, facilities, or livery) and process (i.e. the whole customer experience e.g. a visit the Disney World).

Price

There are many ways to price a product. The pricing policy/ strategy varies in various situations. High involvement products (cars, laptops, apartments, branded cereals and cooking oils) are generally priced much higher than low involvement products (unbranded cereals, potatoes). Various product attributes are taken into account before/ while making a purchase decision.

Place

Another element of Marketing Mix is Place. Place is also known as channel, distribution, or intermediary. It is the mechanism through which goods and/or services are moved from the manufacturer/ service provider to the user or consumer.

Product

For many people, a product is simply the tangible, physical entity that they may be buying or selling. You buy a new TV and that’s the product - simple! Or maybe not. When you buy a TV, is the product more complex than you first thought? In order to actively explore the nature of a product further, lets consider it as three different products - the CORE product (intangible benefit perception of the product), the ACTUAL product (the tangible physical product), and finally the AUGMENTED product (non-physical value added part of the product).

Promotion

Another one of the 4P’s is promotion. This includes all of the tools available to the marketer for ‘marketing communication’. As with Neil H.Borden’s marketing mix, marketing communications has its own ‘promotions mix.’ Think of it like a cake mix, the basic ingredients are always the same. However if you vary the amounts of one of the ingredients, the final outcome is different.

Physical Evidence

Physical Evidence is the material part of a service. Strictly speaking there are no physical attributes to a service, so a consumer tends to rely on material cues. Examples of physical evidences are packaging, web pages, brochures, mail boxes, etc. Some organisations depend heavily upon physical evidence as a means of marketing communications, for example tourism attractions and resorts (e.g. Disney World), parcel and mail services (e.g. DTDC, Blue Dart), and large banks and insurance companies (e.g. ICICI Bank, AXIS Bank, LIC).

People

People are the most important element of any service or experience. Services tend to be produced and consumed at the same moment, and aspects of the customer experience are altered to meet the ‘individual needs’ of the person consuming it.

Process

Process is another element of the extended marketing mix, or 7P’s.There are a number of perceptions of the concept of process within the business and marketing literature. Some see processes as a means to achieve an outcome, for example - to achieve a 30% market share a company implements a marketing planning process.

Example of 7P in Marketing

NIVEA® is an established name in high quality skin and beauty care products. It is part of a range of brands produced and sold by Beiersdorf. Beiersdorf, founded in 1882, has grown to be a global company specialising in skin and beauty care. In the UK, Beiersdorf’s continuing goal is to have its products as close as possible to its consumers, regardless of where they live. Its aims are to understand its consumers in its many different markets and delight them with innovative products for their skin and beauty care needs. This strengthens the trust and appeal of Beiersdorf brands. The business prides itself on being consumer-led and this focus has helped it to grow NIVEA into one of the largest skin care brands in the world.

Beiersdorf’s continuing programme of market research showed a gap in the market. This led to the launch of NIVEA VISAGE® Young in 2005 as part of the NIVEA VISAGE range offering a comprehensive selection of products aimed at young women. It carries the strength of the NIVEA brand image to the target market of girls aged 13-19. NIVEA VISAGE Young helps girls to develop a proper skin care routine to help keep their skin looking healthy and beautiful. The market can be developed by creating a good product/range and introducing it to the market (product-orientated approach) or by finding a gap in the market and developing a product to fill it (market-orientated approach). Having identified a gap in the market, Beiersdorf launched NIVEA VISAGE Young using an effective balance of the right product, price, promotion and place. This is known as the marketing mix or ‘four Ps’. It is vital that a company gets the balance of these four elements correct so that a product will achieve its critical success factors. Beiersdorf needed to develop a mix that suited the product and the target market as well as meeting its own business objectives.

Product

The first stage in building an effective mix is to understand the market. NIVEA uses market research to target key market segments which identifies groups of people with the same characteristics such as age/gender/attitude/lifestyle. The knowledge and understanding from the research helps in the development of new products. NIVEA carries out its market research with consumers in a number of different ways. These include:

• using focus groups to listen to consumers directly
• gathering data from consumers through a variety of different research techniques
• product testing with consumers in different markets.

Beiersdorf’s market research identified that younger consumers wanted more specialised face care aimed at their own age group that offered a ‘beautifying’ benefit, rather than a solution to skin problems. NIVEA VISAGE Young is a skin care range targeted at girls who do not want medicated products but want a regime for their normal skin. Competitor products tend to be problem focused and offer medicated solutions. This gives NIVEA competitive advantage. NIVEA VISAGE Young provides a unique bridge between the teenage market and the adult market. The company improved the product to make it more effective and more consumer-friendly. Beiersdorf tested the improved products on a sample group from its target audience before finalising the range for re-launch. This testing resulted in a number of changes to existing products. Improvements included:

• Changing the formula of some products. For example, it removed alcohol from one product and used natural sea salts and minerals in others.
• Introducing two completely new products.
• A new modern pack design with a flower pattern and softer colours to appeal to younger women.
• Changing product descriptions and introducing larger pack sizes.

Each of these changes helped to strengthen the product range, to better meet the needs of the market.

Price

Lots of factors affect the end price of a product, for example, the costs of production or the business need to maximise profits or sales. A product’s price also needs to provide value for money in the market and attract consumers to buy.

There are several pricing strategies that a business can use:

• Cost based pricing – this can either simply cover costs or include an element of profit. It focuses on the product and does not take account of consumers.
• Penetration price – an initial low price to ensure that there is a high volume of purchases and market share is quickly won. This strategy encourages consumers to develop a habit of buying.
• Price skimming – an initial high price for a unique product encouraging those who want to be ‘first to buy’ to pay a premium price. This strategy helps a business to gain maximum revenue before a competitor’s product reaches the market.

As NIVEA VISAGE Young is one of the leading skin care ranges meeting the beautifying needs of this market segment, it is effectively the price leader. This means that it sets the price level that competitors will follow or undercut. NIVEA needs to regularly review prices should a competitor enter the market at the ‘market growth’ point of the product life cycle to ensure that its pricing remains competitive. The pricing strategy for NIVEA is not the same as that of the retailers. It sells products to retailers at one price. However, retailers have the freedom to use other strategies for sales promotion. These take account of the competitive nature of the high street. They may use:

• loss leader: the retailer sells for less than it cost to attract large volume of sales, for example by supermarkets
• discounting – alongside other special offers, such as ‘Buy one, get one free’ (BOGOF) or ‘two for one’.

Place

Place refers to:

• How the product arrives at the point of sale. This means a business must think about what distribution strategies it will use.
• Where a product is sold. This includes retail outlets like supermarkets or high street shops. It also includes other ways in which businesses make products directly available to their target market, for example, through direct mail or the Internet.

NIVEA VISAGE Young aims to use as many relevant distribution channels as possible to ensure the widest reach of its products to its target market. The main channels for the product are retail outlets where consumers expect to find skin care ranges. Around 65% of NIVEA VISAGE Young sales are through large high street shops such as Boots and Superdrug. Superdrug is particularly important for the ‘young-end’ market. The other 35% of sales mainly comes from large grocery chains that stock beauty products, such as ASDA, Tesco and Sainsbury’s. Market research shows that around 20% of this younger target market buys products for themselves in the high street stores when shopping with friends. Research also shows that the majority of purchasers are actually made by mums, buying for teenagers. Mums are more likely to buy the product from supermarkets whilst doing their grocery shopping.

NIVEA distributes through a range of outlets that are cost effective but that also reach the highest number of consumers. Its distribution strategies also consider the environmental impact of transport. It uses a central distribution point in the UK. Products arrive from European production plants using contract vehicles for efficiency for onward delivery to retail stores. Beiersdorf does not sell direct to smaller retailers as the volume of products sold would not be cost effective to deliver but it uses wholesalers for these smaller accounts. It does not sell directly through its website as the costs of producing small orders would be too high. However, the retailers, like Tesco, feature and sell the NIVEA products in their online stores.

Promotion

Promotion is how the business tells customers that products are available and persuades them to buy. Promotion is either above-the-line or below-the-line. Above-the-line promotion is directly paid for, for example TV or newspaper advertising. Below-the-line is where the business uses other promotional methods to get the product message across:

• Events or trade fairs help to launch a product to a wide audience. Events may be business to consumer (B2C) whereas trade fairs are business to business (B2B).
• Direct mail can reach a large number of people but is not easy to target specific consumers cost-effectively.
• Public relations (PR) includes the different ways a business can communicate with its stakeholders, through, for example, newspaper press releases. Other PR activities include sponsorship of high profile events like Formula 1 or the World Cup, as well as donations to or participation in charity events.
• Branding – a strong and consistent brand identity differentiates the product and helps consumers to understand and trust the product. This aims to keep consumers buying the product long-term.
• Sales promotions, for example competitions or sampling, encourage consumers to buy products in the short-term.

NIVEA chooses promotional strategies that reflect the lifestyle of its audience and the range of media available. It realises that a ‘one way’ message, using TV or the press, is not as effective as talking directly to its target group of consumers. Therefore NIVEA does not plan to use any above-the-line promotion for NIVEA VISAGE Young. The promotion of NIVEA VISAGE Young is consumer-led. Using various below-the-line routes, NIVEA identifies ways of talking to teenagers (and their mums) directly.

• A key part of the strategy is the use of product samples. These allow customers to touch, feel, smell and try the products. Over a million samples of NIVEA VISAGE Young products will be given away during 2008. These samples will be available through the website, samples in stores or in ‘goody bags’ given out at VISAGE roadshows up and down the country.
• NIVEA VISAGE Young launched an interactive online magazine called FYI (Fun, Young & Independent) to raise awareness of the brand. The concept behind the magazine is to give teenage girls the confidence to become young women and to enjoy their new-found independence. Communication channels are original and engaging to enable teenagers to identify with NIVEA VISAGE Young. The magazine focuses on ‘first time’ experiences relating to NIVEA VISAGE Young being their first skincare routine. It is promoted using the

Hit40UK chart show and the TMF digital TV channel.

Conclusion

NIVEA VISAGE Young is a skincare range in the UK market designed to enhance the skin and beauty of the teenage consumer rather than being medicated to treat skin problems. As such, it has created a clear position in the market. This shows that NIVEA understands its consumers and has produced this differentiated product range in order to meet their needs. To bring the range to market, the business has put together a marketing mix. This mix balances the four elements of product, price, place and promotion. The mix uses traditional methods of place, such as distribution through the high street, alongside more modern methods of promotion, such as through social networking sites. It makes sure that the message of NIVEA VISAGE Young reaches the right people in the right way.

References

Hollensen, S, Global Marketing- A decision oriented approach, Pearsson Education Limited, Financial Times Prentice Hall

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Czinokta, M R & Ronkainen, IA International Marketing, fourth ed, Dryden Press, 1995

“Marketing Management, Analysis, Planning and Control”, Philip Kotler – PHI.

“Marketing Management”– Stanton – John Wiley.