Text 5. The Marketing Mix

The essentials of a firm's marketing effort include their abilities: (1) to determine the needs of their customers and (2) to create and maintain an effective marketing mix that satisfies customers' needs.

The marketing mix consists of four main elements — product, price, distribution or place, and promotion — used by a marketing manager to market goods and services. These four factors have become known as four P's of marketing. It's the marketing manager's responsibility to determine how best to use each element in the firm's marketing efforts.

A product is a set of tangible and intangible attributes? Including packaging, colour, price, quality, and brand, plus services and reputation of the seller. The definition says that consumers buy more than a set of physical attributes. They buy want-satisfaction in the form of product benefits, such as the brand name or service provided by the seller.

The corporate marketing department also determines each product's initial price. The process involves establishing each product's normal price and possible special discount prices. Since product price is often critical to customers, it is an important part of the marketing mix.

The marketing manager also determines the best method of distributing the product. It is important to have the product available to customers in a convenient and accessible location.

Promotion, as part of the marketing mix, is designed to increase company sales by communicating product information to potential customers. The four basic parts of a firm's promotional effort are (2) personal selling, (2) advertising, (3) publicity, and (4) sales promotion.

The marketing manager determines what proportion of the firm's budget will be allocated to each product and how much emphasis on each of the promotional variables will be given to each product. The American Marketing Association recently defined the role of marketing managers as follows: "Marketing management is the process of planning and executing, the conception, pricing, promotion and distribution (place) of ideas, goods, and services (products) to create exchange that satisfies individual and organizational goals" (Ch. Futrell. Fundamental of Selling. Boston: IRWIN, 1990).

Vocabulary list:

tangible — осязаемый, материальный, ощутимый, реальный;

trademark — торговая марка;

warrant — правомочие, правомерие, свидетельство;

variable (n) — переменная (величина), переменный (фактор), составная часть.