The Marketing Mix 4 P's Model

What it does:
Assesses the strength of a product or service within a particular market segment and consumer group; also helps identify products with high growth potential.

Its other names:
The Marketing Mix 4 P's Model; The 4 P's of Marketing; The Marketing Mix Model.

Where it comes from:
Marketing professor Neil H. Borden's 1965 article "The Concept of the Marketing Mix"; also the 1960 book Principles of Marketing by E. Jerome McCarthy (Irwin).

Summary:
A product's strengths are sorted for analysis into the 4 P's:

1. Product -- Is the product what consumers want? Consider brand name appeal, packaging, quality, styling, and warrantees.
2. Price -- Is the pricing strategy working? Consider competitive products, suggested retail price, wholesale pricing, cash discounts for volume sales, and other factors that impact on per-unit profit.
3. Place -- Where is the product being bought by consumers? Consider "Brick and mortar" and Internet retailers.
4. Promotion -- How well is marketing working? Consider advertising, public relations, sales force, and sales promotions.

What else you need to know:
Marketers keep trying to improve on the 4 P's Model, but its simplicity has kept it a useful and durable marketing tool for product analysis. One of the most useful refinements was proposed by B. H. Booms and Mary-Joe Bitner in Marketing Strategies and Organisation Structures for Service Firms, published in 1981 by the American Marketing Association. In that article, they added three additional P's to the above four, bringing the total to seven. These extra P's are:

1. People -- From consumers to marketers to the people who manufacture a product, people exert a great impact on its marketplace success.
2. Process -- The procedures and mechanisms that consumers use to acquire products(e.g., retail, Internet, direct-response or other buying systems) are essential to bring the product to market. Examples: Retail, Internet, direct-response or other buying systems.
3. Physical evidence -- The "real world" factors that influence buying behavior, such as advertising and customers' prior experience with a brand or specific product will also determine success in the marketplace.