5 Pillars of Marketing Management
Marketing management relies on five basic components, specifically termed as its five pillars: product, price, place, promotion and people. Also known as 5 Ps, these pillars are the fundamental basics where marketing managers need to focus on to achieve maximum output in terms of branding, sales and marketing. In order to develop a strong marketing strategy, you must emphasize each of these five pillars individually.
Let’s understand these five pillars in detail.
Product
You can either refer to a physical product here (a smartphone, for instance) or a service (such as hospitality). A product should be such that it meets a client’s needs and expectations. Sometimes, the need (hunger) already exists, and you fulfil it through a product (food options). The other times, your product can create the need (e-wallets) or desire (iPhone) to own it. However, no matter what your product is, it should be of high-quality and relevant to people’s pain points or else it is not going to sell. So, first of all, marketing management must target to match the particular product’s characteristics as per customers’ expectations. This helps in cutting off competition and also builds instant recognition around the product in the market.
Price
Correct pricing is an essential factor that directly affects marketing. If you want to sell a product or service successfully, you have to ensure that its cost is appealing to the buyer. If it is too high, then customers will not buy it. If it is too low, then customers may think it is of low quality. Before pasting the final price tag, it is necessary to consider both manufacturing costs as well as psychic price. While manufacturing costs are decided by all costs that went into the making and distribution of the product, the psychic price is the added cost that the consumer has to bear in terms of stress, time or effort. So, the psychic price of an entertainment park ticket may include the long hours taken out by visitors and the effort to travel long distances. The total cost of the product is rounded off with a profit margin to earn revenues.
Though, there are various pricing models you may use:
- Value-based: perceived value to the customer – this is similar to psychic price.
- Cost-based: adding up all costs related to the product and top it up with the percentage of profit you are expecting. This is the most commonly used pricing model.
- Performance-based: the customer is charged on the basis of the performance of the product of service.
- Fixed price-based: this is generally used by organizations providing their services as a product. For instance, an interior designer can decide on fixing his or her consultation charges to ‘x’ amount for ‘y’ hours.
Place
This marketing pillar comprises providing access to customers to buy a product. It could be a physical or an online shop. The customers should easily be able to locate your store, or the product should be easily available in the customer’s reach. The products and services pass through a distribution chain starting from producer and routed through wholesalers and retailers to eventually be made available to customers. Even the e-commerce websites have to follow a distribution channel throughout the sales funnel. So, right from making the website visible in the search engines to ensuring doorstep delivery, the e-commerce sellers have to think of the place from all perspectives.
Promotion
Advertising is another marketing pillar whose importance is strongly emphasized in all marketing as well as public relations courses. This pillar is instrumental in deciding a strategy which can create awareness about the product and increase its visibility among the customers. Promotion is used to highlight the benefits that make your product the right choice. As a part of the effective promotional strategy, you must be able to reach out to target audience accurately and showcase information that makes them choose your product instantly. Promotion is a mix of traditional advertising (television, print and public relations) as well as digital marketing (emails and social media).
If you want to build your career in product promotion, you can consider reputed online public relations courses.
People
Apart from the above mentioned four pillars of marketing, this fifth pillar called people is also considered an important mix of marketing management. People are the biggest capital asset any company can have. If this pillar crumbles, then the entire marketing operations can come to a halt. This is especially true for service-based industries like health care or food delivery. For instance, the actions of delivery persons are critical to a food service organization like Zomato or Uber. So, such companies focus a lot on training them in good conduct and caring attitudes as their positive behaviour creates a long-lasting impression in the buyer’s mind. A positive brand image is built which goes a long way in marketing themselves successfully.
These are five critical pillars that can strengthen a product or service’s marketing strategy.
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