The Truth About Marketing Part IV

For those of you who have been following the series on the "Truth About Marketing" welcome back! For those of you who may be new to the blog or to this series I recommend that you go back and review the first three parts in the series, "The Truth About Marketing III", "The Truth About Marketing II", "The Truth About Marketing I".

Since it has been a while since I posted a new entry (sorry about that) here's a brief recap. Thus far we have talked about what marketing is, what it isn't, target markets, macro push versus macro pull and in Part III we discussed market segmentation.

Now let's continue our discussion by talking about marketing mix, a.k.a. The 4 P's. For each market segment defined using market segmentation points you will want to apply its own marketing mix. The marketing mix or 4 P's is composed of Product, Price, Place and Promotion. Let's talk about them one at a time, starting with the first one, which is Product. The remaing three P's (price, place and promotion) will be discussed in subsequent blog posts.



PRODUCT





You may believe that your product or service is easy to define, yet there are many aspects that you need to think through to complete this first element of your mix. If you are in the printing business is a printed brochure simply information portrayed in a creative manner? What does it say about the company, its products, its quality and its commitment to their customers? Your product or service is more complex than you might think and you must make decisions relative to what you are offering your customers.  Your product or service has three levels, these are:  The Core product, the Actual product and the Augmented product. 

• Your Core product is not the actual, physical product.  You can’t touch it because your core product is the Benefit of the product that will make it valuable to the customer.  If you buy a sports car the benefit is speed and the ability to travel quickly.  If you hire a temporary worker your benefit is your work project will be completed faster, better, or at lower costs.

• Your Actual product is the tangible product or service.  If you buy a car you will use it for transportation, it is tangible.  If you hire a temporary worker, you get work done…again tangible.

• Your Augmented product is the non-physical parts of your product or service that add lots of value that may or may not have a price.  If I buy a car, I get a warranty, after sale service, and customer support.  If I hire a temporary worker I don’t have employee benefits to pay, the company stands behind the temp employee’s work, and I can hire more temps if needed.

 
If you apply the three levels of product to one or more of your market segments, hopefully, you will agree that different market segments view “product” completely different from one another. For some the core element is more important than actual, while others will be more focused on augmented and core, with very little emphasis on actual. So, we must repeat our earlier statement; “Is a printed brochure simply a brochure…?" 

Until our next blog posting you may wish to give thought to each of your market segments and then think in terms of how each market views your product or service.

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