(If you can, you are among a select few) For fun I teach a college marketing class. By the end of the semester every student knows the four “P”s of marketing. It’s elementary. Yet in the thirty years of business I’ve found only a handful of business people who remember them.
Before you read further, do you know them? You should.
The four “P”s are Product, Price, Place and Promotion. To understand marketing you need to get marketing terms clear in your head. If you don’t take the time to learn the basics, marketing will always seem confusing to you. But learn a few terms and you will be surprised how quickly you will be able to take control.
Most “marketers” work mainly with Place, which means distribution channels, and Promotion.
Product and Price are primarily dealt with in the early stage of the product’s lifecycle. R&D takes care of creating the Product and some blend of management and accounting determine a profitable Price. There is additional work done on both Product and Price through the product’s life but not at the level of the early stages. It’s usually just tweaking the Product for minor improvements and fine tuning the Price or offering discounts.
Marketing is complex and difficult, and that’s normal. What’s abnormal is when marketing seems confusing. Understanding the facets that the four “P”s represent will help you bring your daily work and marketing meetings into focus.
To add to the confusion, just as with many of the words in the English language, some words in marketing have more than one meaning. Take the word Marketing for example. Marketing is the overall process that includes all four “P”s. But Marketing is often incorrectly used to describe just the facet Promotion.
Someone will tell you, “I handle all the marketing for product X” when in fact they have nothing to do with R&D and no control over pricing. They are actually in charge of Promotion. You might think I’m just playing with semantics but if you want to think clearly about marketing you need to be able to categorize thousands of elements in your mind. I guarantee that if you have the four “P”s clearly defined in your mind and you run up against someone who doesn’t , you will have a distinct advantage over them. And as I said, very few “Marketers” organize their thoughts even on the most elementary level.
The following are brief definitions of Marketing and its four “P”s.
Marketing: The action of planning and executing product development, pricing, distribution and promotion for the purpose of satisfying both the needs of the organization and the individual. Product: An item, either tangible or a service, that is produced for sale. Price: That which is given up in the exchange for the product. Place (Distribution): The chain of physical locations where both raw materials and finished products reside and the processes involved. Promotion: The communication of a product’s features, benefits and need satisfaction for the purpose of influencing a purchase.
