The most basic framework in marketing is the 4 Ps. Here’s how it breaks down:
- Product
- Price
- Place
- Promotion
Let’s review these basic components:
Product. This is the thing that you want to sell to people. It can be a book, a service, even an emotion. Everything that provides value is bundled up in product, from packaging to features & benefits.
The most common mistake made by companies? Attempting to use marketing to fix a product problem. The bottom line is that if your product sucks, if your product is something that no one wants or needs, you won’t develop growth. Yes, you’ll sucker a few people here or there into buying your stuff, but they won’t buy again and they won’t tell their friends anything positive about you.
Price. How much do you sell your product or service for? More broadly, how much value does your product or service deliver?
Pricing is its own science, but one of the key things marketers get wrong is failing to connect price to value, to the benefit delivered for a price. If, as an example, you’re trying to sell a financial service, and your price is $1 but your service delivers value of $4 for every $1 spent, then you can raise your price and still deliver value to your customers. Conversely, if your service costs $1 but delivers 50 cents of value, you’ve got a long death spiral ahead of you. Marketing can slow it down, but you’re still doomed.
Place. Where can someone get your product or service? This is a much trickier question in marketing now than it used to be. In the early days of the industrial revolution, place was simple. You went to a store to buy products. In the information age, place can be virtual.
One area that gets especially murky in marketing (and martial arts!) is that place also has a time component. Yes, you can market on Twitter or Facebook, but to make your marketing effective, there is also a time in a relationship you’ve built to do that marketing. If you understand place but not time, you still won’t get the results you want, even though you may be standing in the same place as a competitor.
Promotion. This is the mainstay of marketing, the part that has all the visibility and attention – rightly so, because it’s the part that generates the most results and the part that’s hardest to gain proficiency with. Promotion is telling the right people about your product or service’s very existence so that they can learn more about it and ideally buy it from you.
This is longer than the usual quote I curate, but Christopher Penn really nails it in this article. Go to the source if you want the rest of his perspective…
Bright, shiny objects! 
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