Understanding the nature of customers and their needs and wants is only the first step of creating a marketing strategy– promotional campaign.

The brand/ organisation needs to act of that information in order to develop and implement marketing activities that actually deliver something of value to the customer.

The process that we go through is called the ‘Marketing Mix’.

Successful marketing relies as much on interaction and synergy between marketing mix elements as it does on good decisions within those elements themselves.

A good product with bad communication will not work, and equally a bad product with the glossiest advertising will not work either.. This is because the element so the marketing mix depend on each other and if they are not consistent with each other in what they are saying about the product, then the customer, who is not stupid, will reject it all.

1. Product: This area covers everything to do with the

creation, development and management of products. It is not only about what to make, but

when to make it, how to make it, and how to ensure it has a long a profitable life.

Particularly with fast moving consumer goods (fmcg), part of the products attractiveness is of course its branding and packaging and the experience gain during and after the purchase.

Also see Product lifecycle.

2. Price: Price is not perhaps as clear cut as it might seem at first glance, since price is not necessarily a straightforward calculation of costs and profit margins.

Price has to reflect issues of buyer behaviour, because people judge ‘value’ in terms of their perceptions of what they are getting for their money, what else they could have had for that money and how much that money meant to then in the first place.

Pricing also has a strategic dimension, in that it can give messages to all sorts of people in the target market.

Customers, fir example may use price as an indicator of quality and desirability for a particular product. And thus price can reinforce or distroy the work of other elements of the marketing mix.

Competitors on the other hands may see price as a challenge- the beginnings of a price war.

Overall price is a very flexible element of the marketing mix.

3. Place:Place is a very dynamic and fast moving area of marketing. It covers a wide variety of

fascination topics largely concerned with the movements of goods from A to B.

For consumer products, the most visible player in the channel of distribution is the retailer. Manufactures and customers alike have to put allot of trust in the retailer to do justice to the product, to maintain stocks, and to provide a satisfying purchasing experience.

Place also embodies more unique marketing problems such as store location, layout, merchandising, creation of store atmosphere.

4. Promotion: Promotion = communication, which is more

often seen as the most glamorous and sexy side of marketing. This does not mean however that the marketing communication is purely ‘artistic’ or that is can be used to distract and wallpaper over cracks in the rest of the marketing mix.

Promotion consists of a whole range of marketing communication techniques, not just paid advertising; but sales promotions, personal selling, public relations, direct marketing, e-marketing, viral, guerrilla....etc.