Marketing Mix: Product – What is Product Marketing?

in our video on the marketing mix the
first of the four p's was product
and product means their goods and the
services that you offer to your
customers and your clients
so this element of the marketing mix is
about addressing your customers needs
their preferences
their desires
whether they know it or not
there are two main differentiators
between different types of products and
the first of them is the difference
between consumer products or retail
products
and commercial
or business to business or trade
products on the other hand
and the second main differentiator is
that between physical goods
and services
which are often completely intangible
of course within each of these there are
a great number of variations and
categories themselves
but even within these four main types of
service or product
the principles of how we apply product
in the marketing mix
are consistent
so what are the important elements of
the product component of the marketing
mix
well to me there are five critical
components
and the first of them is new product
development npd
the whole process of identifying what
the market wants what market needs what
consumers are clamoring for and what
they don't yet know
that they're going to want in the future
identifying that
developing a product through the
research and development process
prototyping it testing it trialing it
manufacturing it and bringing it to
market that is the npd process
secondly is the whole design ethic that
goes with your product and the detailing
and and how it looks and how it feels to
use how our customers are going to
experience it industrial and commercial
design is a huge topic but a very very
important part
of the product aspect of the marketing
mix
next we have the whole topic of product
management
now some would argue that product
management starts with the npd process
but there is no doubt that once a
product is coming to market it is
product management that brings it to
market
that actually coordinates a lot of the
marketing mix itself
but it also manages the product through
its whole life cycle
it manages all of the processes around
sales around support both pre-sales
support and customer support after sale
and of course it also manages the
process of upgrades
enhancements and new versions of the
product
the mission of a product manager is to
treat the product like a business
and to optimize its value
fourth we have product support and again
this could be seen as a part of the
product management process
part of the role of the product manager
but product support tends to be a
separate part of the business and
sometimes it's divided into pre-sales
support particularly in the business to
business sector and after sales support
or customer support
and let's not forget that customer
support also includes the complaints
process
all of this reflects on customers
perceptions of your product is therefore
fundamentally a part of your marketing
effort
and finally you need to think about how
you will package and sell your product
this includes things like branding
the quantities and the size of the
packets the different versions that
you'll have of your product whether
they're sizes
colors
versions for men and women for example
the razer industry all of these are part
of how you sell your product
but there's more
there's all the things that go with it
like instructions
websites guarantees and warranties and
i'm not a lawyer so i'm not even going
to touch upon what might or might not be
the difference between a guarantee and a
warranty
it's worth mentioning that packaging is
sometimes identified as a separate p
but in the original mccarthy
articulation of four p's he saw
packaging very much as part of the
product
from this we have four important roles
in product marketing
first we need to identify
the customers needs the problems they
want to solve or the solutions they want
to get
and to find ways to embed all of this in
the product
and all of the associated kind of
marketing components the price the place
and of course the promotions
secondly we have the task of identifying
what segment of the market we are going
to promote the product to
who are most likely to buy the product
who we can optimize our product for
third we need to create the customer
personas or avatars sometimes known as
buyer personas
the descriptions of our ideal customers
that are going to feed into all our
decisions about things like
functionality packaging and of course
messaging
and fourth we need to carry out a
competitive analysis of the marketplace
to understand where our product sits in
the ecosystem of its competitors
this understanding will help us to
optimize things like our promotions our
pricing and our placing of our product
all of this is about creating a product
that people want and differentiating it
in their mind from other competing
products
product is the right place to start our
understanding of marketing mix
because without the product there is
nothing to market
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