Intro to Marketing

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As per usual, let's get started with a definition. According to Investopedia, Marketing refers to activities a company undertakes to promote the buying and selling of a product or service. If that seems pretty straight-forward, it's probably because it is!

In fact, I can promise you that you've seen examples of marketing before.

Have you ever seen a billboard while driving down a highway? That's marketing. How about the advertisements that play on TV while you watch your favorite show? Also marketing. Oh, when you watch previews at a movie theatre? Surprise, still marketing.

Marketing is, in my opinion, one of the most essential parts of running a business. It's how you sell! If your intended audience doesn't know about the product or service you're trying to sell, how are they supposed to buy it?

So, how do marketers (and for lack of better words here) market?

Marketers make use of the "marketing mix," also known as the four Ps—product, price, place, and promotion to do their job. This "marketing mix" makes up the essential mix of strategies a company needs to market a product or service.

What Are the Four Ps?

Product- Product refers to an item or items the business plans to offer to customers. A product should fulfill a gap in the market, or fulfill customer demand for a greater amount of a certain product. In order for marketers to prepare a proper campaign or advertisement strategy for a product, they must what the product is, what it does, how it stands out from competitors, and if it can be paired with a secondary product or a product line. A product line is a group of related products made by the same company. For instance, your iPhone (which is probably in your hand RIGHT NOW). Maybe you have the iPhone 11, or maybe you have the SE, either way, it's a product made by Apple with the same function and even the same title.

Price- Price refers to how much the company will sell the product for. While this part may seem like you just slap a number on a price tag, there's actually a lot of thought that goes into pricing a product. For instance, companies must consider the unit cost price, marketing costs, and distribution expenses for the product they hope to sell. In addition, they must also consider the price of competing products in the marketplace and whether their proposed price point will draw customers to purchase their product instead of someone else's.

Place- Place refers to the distribution of the product. A company's marketers must decide how and where the company will sell their products. Online? In a physical store? Or through both distributions channels? Some products are better suited for online sale, but some are better off being sold in a physical store. This decision can greatly impact the success of a small business.

Promotion- Promotion, the fourth P, is the integrated marketing communications campaign. The types of promotional activity are endless: advertising, selling, sales promotions, public relations, direct marketing, sponsorship, and guerrilla marketing. Promotions vary depending on what stage of the product life cycle the product is in. Marketers understand that consumers associate a product’s price and distribution with its quality, and they take this into account when devising the overall marketing strategy.

So yeah, marketing is pretty important to a company of any size. I hope you learned something new about the field of marketing through this post. If you did, practice some marketing yourself and promote this blog post and our website by sharing it with friends and family! (shameless self promo, i won't apologize haha)