The Four Ps of marketing

In the 1960s, the Harvard Business School discovered a number of company actions that influence the decision to buy goods or services. They suggested that the actions are a “Marketing Mix”, containing four elements: product, price, promotion and placement.

Product: The product aspects of marketing cover the specifications, and how they relate to the end-user's needs and wants. The scope of a product normally includes supporting elements such as warranties, support and guarantees.

Pricing: This covers the process of setting the best price for a product, including discounts. The price does not necesarily need to be monetary - it can be what’s exchanged for the product or service - time, energy, or a measure of attention.

Promotion: This covers web advertising, sales promotion, publicity, and face-to-face selling and branding, and refers to the various methods of sales promotion.

Placement (or distribution): covers how the product or service gets to the customer eg distribution or retailing. This fourth P is also called Place, referring to the channel through which it is sold (eg online or retail etc), which region or industry and which market segment (eg teenagers, families, business people etc).

These four marketing elements are often called the marketing mix, which can be used to create a marketing plan. The four Ps marketing model is useful for B2B both products and services. High-value consumer products require refinement to this model. Services marketing must also take account of the unique nature of the services.

B2B marketing must also take into account long-term agreements typically found in supply chain contracts. Relationship marketing attempts to accomplish this by looking at all aspects of marketing from a long-term relationship-building angle rather than looking at individual transactions.

Top 10 PR Tips

1) Talking about doing PR isn't as good as actually doing something. Waiting for the best story to happen can take a while, it is better to get something out there

2) Have a steady stream of appropriate PR to editors seeking your content

3) Read the up-coming Features list and try to put some PR relevant to the feature

4) Find a PR company that can make something out of your product or service, that you might think is normal

5) Use pictures with your PR to help Editors to visualise your uniqueness

6) 'The more you write the less gets read' good PR companies have learnt to be brief and to the point

7) Recycle old PR with a fresh new slant, in some fringe publications

8) Good PR agents will find a good story by just interviewing your customers

9) Fully written-up Testimonials with pictures are like gold, you can use them for PR and for sending to prospects in your marketing materials

10) Measure the success of your PR with clippings, but allow time for editors to start using your submissions

A technique used in public relations is to identify the specific target audience, and then to tailor every message to appeal directly to that audience. The audience can be a general, nationwide or worldwide audience, and it is often a segment of a entire population. Marketers often refer to "demographics" such as "black males 20-40" for example. In public relations an audience is often more fluid, being whoever a company wants to reach. For example, recent political target audiences include "soccer moms". There is also a grouping based on fitness, eating preferences etc.

As well as audiences, there are stakeholders, people who have a "stake" in a specific issue. All audiences are potential stakeholders, but not all of the stakeholders are audiences. To provide an example, a charity enlists a PR agency to produce a campaign to raise money to find potential cures for a disease. The charity and the sufferers of the disease are stakeholders, and the audience is everyone who could donate money.