Marketing Mix

Marketing Mix

The term marketing mix was found by Neil Borden who began using the phrase in the year 1949. According to Jussila et al., (2015), the marketing mix is a mix of different ingredients that are used by the company to evaluate their competitive position within the market. Specifically, the marketing mix is a theoretical tool that is used by business and market producers to determine the offerings of the product and brands.

Figure 1: Marketing mix

(Source: Jussila et al., 2015)

Marketing mix consists of different element product, prices, place and promotion. After the foundation of there in the late 70’s, it was acknowledged by the business markets that it is necessary for marketing to be updated. These led to the development of expanded marketing Mix in the year 1981 by Booms & Bitner that added 3 more elements to the 4p marketing mix that are the process, people, and physical evidence.

Porter’s five forces

Porter’s five forces theory of marketing is a framework that attempts to evaluate the level of competition present within the specific industry and development of business strategy. In this aspect, the theory draws upon the industrial economics for deducing the five forces that demonstrate the competitive intensity and attractiveness of the industry (Groening, Sarkis & Zhu, 2018).

Figure 2: Porter’s five forces of competitive advantage

(Source: Groening, Sarkis & Zhu, 2018)

However, the model is originated from Michael E. Porter’s in the year 1980 in his book popularly known as “Competitive Strategy”. Since the publication of the book, this theoretical technique of marketing has been quite frequently used by the marketers for evaluating organisation’s structure and its corporate technique (Lam & Harker, 2015).

In this book, Porter recognised five competitive forces that frame the industry and market. These five forces of completive advantage help the organisation to evaluate the intensity of growing competition and the attractiveness of the industry.

Porter’s five forces is a theoretical tool that is used for analysing the competition in the market to identify the major challenge of the organisation. On the contrary, Resnick et al., (2016) stated that marketing mix consists of four major p’s product price, place and promotion that helps to determine the product and service provided by the company for retaining the customers. The marketing mix is usually functional in nature that helps to meet the demands made by the consumers.

Porter’s five forces

These components consist of the locations and networks by which consumers can communicate with the organisation and distribution of the product (McDougall?Covin, Jones & Serapio, 2014). In addition to this, the price inside the marketing mix illustrates the discount and credit terms that are appropriate for the product and the consumers.

On the contrary, Porter’s five forces determine the power of the suppliers and the power of the consumers to demonstrate the relationship between the industry and the consumers based on product and services (Huang & Sarigöllü, 2014). The theory also determines the barriers and challenges faced by the organisation due to the emerging market and threats of getting substitute due to the rising competition. Similar to this, the marketing mix also evaluates the channels used by the organisation to defend competition in the market.

Conversely, when profits fall down, consumers expect some of the firms to exit from the market that will signify new entrants in the market with an expectation that future prices may fall down. However, both theories determine the marketing requirement and competition present within the market.

The marketing mix was originally founded by Edmund Jerome McCarthy in the year 1960. However, with the development of the market, a new marketing mix was developed in 1981 by Booms and Bitner by adding the elements, process and physical evidence to the marketing mix (Liu et al., 2017). The three additional elements of P’s are used until now by the different organisation. People in the marketing mix signify that all the people in the organisation and general employees bring value to the company that may influence the whole business.

Along with the evolution of marketing theories, strategies and concepts all these were directly absorbed within the strategic marketing idea. Both of these marketing theories have converged into the existing state of marketing strategy. According to Dobbs (2015), it is an electric mixture of both complementary and conflicting approaches of strategy and concepts in the existing time. Organisational managers, as well as marketers, use this theory of marketing mix and Porter’s five forces to measure the intensity of competition in the existing market. By marketing the organisation is able to measure their growing strength of technology and processes used by the organisation while manufacturing the products.

In order to set up successful corporate strategies in the organisation uses these competitive forces in such a way that helps them enhance the position of the organisation. In this context, Porter’s five forces theory supports the evaluation of the driving forces within the industry (Jarzabkowski & Kaplan, 2015). Based on the information derived from the marketing mix and porters five forces theory, the management within the organisation is able to decide the influence and feature on a specific feature within the industry in the existing period.

Modern Marketing Strategies

A transformation of marketing strategies is underway as consumers are now spending much of their time on mobiles, tablets and laptops. Therefore, it is the challenge for brands to communicate with the consumers through the technological devices thereby creating campaigns that work on social media and e-commerce platform (Huggins & Izushi, 2015).

In this context, the real-time communication that brands have with consumers as they interact through websites and social media has transformed the nature of marketing in the present era. Therefore, the modern day marketing is dependent on the combination of creative idea associated with the technical side of data, and digital analytics.

According to Kane et al., (2015) marketing is concerned with the understanding of consumer’s motivation and using these technological insights to develop campaigns for promoting brands and influence people to purchase their products. All these activities are now highly influenced by the use of technology specifically in social media marketing. With so many various ways by which customers are now able to access media through Facebook, YouTube, news websites, Instagram, twitter that can help the brands to gain huge scale.

Marketers nowadays just need to update their skills for making this systems move fast and highly relevant through digital media. Technology now has brought data analytics inside marketing, therefore, technically affiliated employees on the digital side have to become more creative while advertising products and campaigns through social media and digital platform (Huggins & Izushi, 2015).

Major organisations such as Apple and Ford have spent billions of money to study consumer behaviour. They wanted to know the reason that influences the purchasing decision of customers. As stated by Trainor et al., (2015), consumer behaviour is the collection of behavioural patterns that consumer tends to follow while purchasing products.

The decision starts when the consumer becomes an area of their need to purchase the product that usually ends with the cost transaction of the product. In this context, markers respond saying there are several factors that may influence the buying decision of the consumers.  However, Dodgson (2018) stated that consumer behaviour in marketing is the response given by the marketers that are exhibited by the target market against the marketing resources.   

For instance, marketers can market and promote each hour of the day for three continuous months, but the marketers may not be aware of the reaction of the target market will react to those messages or not. Then the marketers may waste the entire time of marketing. Therefore, according to the response made by the marketer, it is necessary to understand the throughout process about different alternatives that customer may choose, consumer reason to select between different alternatives (Wu, Straub & Liang, 2015).

Consumer Behaviour

All these are required to be understood to improve and implement the marketing campaigns in such a way to influence the consumer. To understand and enhance these marketing campaigns, marketers use these marketing theories to retain an increased number of the customer,

According to the response made by the markets, the considerations of the consumers are influenced by three major factors such as an individual consumer’s interest and opinion regarding the product. These will be influenced by the demographics such as age, gender, culture and profession (Dobbs, 2014). Another is the fact that individual responses to the specific marketing campaign are based on the perception and behaviour of the consumers. Third are the peer groups from family and friends as well as social media influence.

User-generated marketing content in social media is the most influential way to persuade the customer to buy products. According to the survey, it has been found that almost 839 millennial spend almost 5.4 hours each day creating content by their peers (Huang & Sarigöllü, 2014). These accounts for 30% of their total media time and these are competed by all the traditional types of media such as print, radio as well as television.

Along with this, in the similar survey, it has also been found that millennial have stated that social media content marketing is 20% more impactful on the persuading the purchasing decision of the consumers than any other media platforms (Lam  & Harker, 2015). This can be achieved by having customer’s shared personal content and by providing them with the tools to create an ad for the company through social media. These will help to increase the customer base as well as the satisfaction of the customers.

Marketing Mix

Product

The food product that will be launched will be a food bar as a replacement for a meal, a healthy compliment and quick energy boosting bar for the customers. The product will be made up of fruits, cereals such as oats and some nuts that have reduced calorie concentration in it. The product will be launched by Woolworth for the health conscious customers.

Positioning

The Woolworth store will position them as an importer of a high-end innovative food product using a commercial cereal bar making processer (Risselada, Verhoef & Bijmolt, 2014). To obtain these, the machines will leverage upon their competitive edge. The product will be launched in most of the grocery stores of Woolworth. The product will be targeted to the young and middle-income customer who is health conscious and hardworking living in Australia.

Price

  The prices of the food bar will be designed in a competitive way with a fair margin (Dodgson, 2018). The new food energy bar will be priced at AU$1.50 to increase the profit thought the product and the competitions charges for the bard will be AU$2 for the bars and $0.75 for the packaging prices of the product.

Promotion

The entire plan for launching the new product will be noted down in a report. After this, the advertising employees of Woolworth will be needed to create an advertising campaign and content creation through social media platform devoted to the target customers (Kane et al., 2015).

Reference list

Dodgson, M. (2018). Technological collaboration in industry: strategy, policy and internationalization in innovation.  Abingdon: Routledge.

Dobbs, M. (2014). Guidelines for applying Porter’s five forces framework: a set of industry analysis templates. Competitiveness Review, 24(1), 32-45.

Groening, C., Sarkis, J., & Zhu, Q. (2018). Green marketing consumer-level theory review: A compendium of applied theories and further research directions. Journal of Cleaner Production, 172, 1848-1866.

Huang, R., & Sarigöllü, E. (2014). How brand awareness relates to the market outcome, brand equity, and the marketing mix. In Fashion Branding and Consumer Behaviors (pp. 113-132). Springer, New York, NY.

Huggins, R., & Izushi, H. (2015). The Competitive Advantage of Nations: origins and journey. Competitiveness Review, 25(5), 458-470.

Jarzabkowski, P., & Kaplan, S. (2015). Strategy tools?in?use: A framework for understanding “technologies of rationality” in practice. Strategic Management Journal, 36(4), 537-558.

Jussila, I., Tarkiainen, A., Sarstedt, M., & Hair, J. F. (2015). Individual psychological ownership: Concepts, evidence, and implications for research in marketing. Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice, 23(2), 121-139.

Kane, G. C., Palmer, D., Phillips, A. N., Kiron, D., & Buckley, N. (2015). Strategy, not technology, drives digital transformation. MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte University Press, 14, 1-25.

Lam, W., & Harker, M. J. (2015). Marketing and entrepreneurship: An integrated view from the entrepreneur’s perspective. International Small Business Journal, 33(3), 321-348.

Liu, Y., Li, K. J., Chen, H., & Balachander, S. (2017). The effects of products’ aesthetic design on demand and marketing-mix effectiveness: The role of segment prototypicality and brand consistency. Journal of Marketing, 81(1), 83-102.

McDougall?Covin, P., Jones, M. V., & Serapio, M. G. (2014). High?potential concepts, phenomena, and theories for the advancement of international entrepreneurship research. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 38(1), 1-10.

Resnick, S. M., Cheng, R., Simpson, M., & Lourenço, F. (2016). Marketing in SMEs: a “4Ps” self-branding model. International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research, 22(1), 155-174.

Risselada, H., Verhoef, P. C., & Bijmolt, T. H. (2014). Dynamic effects of social influence and direct marketing on the adoption of high-technology products. Journal of Marketing, 78(2), 52-68.

Trainor, K. J., Andzulis, J. M., Rapp, A., & Agnihotri, R. (2014). Social media technology usage and customer relationship performance: A capabilities-based examination of social CRM. Journal of Business Research, 67(6), 1201-1208.

Wu, S. P. J., Straub, D. W., & Liang, T. P. (2015). How information technology governance mechanisms and strategic alignment influence organizational performance: Insights from a matched survey of business and IT managers. Mis Quarterly, 39(2), 497-518.