The 5 P's: Create Your Marketing Strategy and Plan

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes and you're listening to the Business Bootcamp podcast. Today we're going to be talking about how you can create your marketing mix using the five Ps now, spoiler alert. And that is that if I look back on my MBA and the education that I got from business school, this is the one thing that actually stood out to me and I learned the most and probably was 80% of the learning in about 2% of the time. So I want to share some of those things Today, what the five Ps of your marketing mix need to be in order to create a successful marketing strategy. Before we get into today's show, though, a big thank you to today's sponsor, which is Gusto. If you haven't already, go to gusto.combootcamp. when you go there, they're gonna give you a free 90 day trial of their software. And just recently, we had the PPP program, the Eidl program, and other programs revolving around making sure that your employees got paid. One of the biggest reasons why people did not get paid and did not get the money in time was because they did not have their documentation ready to go. And the reason they didn't have their documentation ready to go is because they didn't use something like Gusto that kept track of everything and they could quickly get reports from. So make sure you go to gusto.com, try out. It's completely free for 90 days, and then it's one of the cheapest products on the market with the best service after that goes on. So, so check it out. Today go to gusto.combootcamp so today we're talking about the five P's and how they can come together to make a really good marketing Strategy. Using the five Ps is what's called your marketing mix. Now, today might seem a little more theoretical, and usually I'm a little bit more practical in terms of what the applications of this business education is. But today I'm gonna go a little more theoretical because it's, it really does span every single industry. And I'm going to go over some of the implications of what it means for your small business, and you're going to see certain areas that you can improve on and certain areas you never thought of as marketing that you can actually take advantage of. First off, let's go over what the five Ps are. Number one is product. Number two is price. Number three is promotion. Number four is place, and number five is people. We're gonna look at each one of the five P's and see where you can improve and look at successful businesses in each of those categories and where we can learn from them. Now you're going to find that there's gonna be certain parts of the five Ps that you're really strong at and other pieces you can see a lot of room for improvement. And so I wanna adjust your mindset to even look outside of your industry and your category, your product, your service, and really get into think about marketing from a much more macro level, looking at other industries and the, the theory of marketing. So that way you can really begin to think creatively about your industry and looking at it from a different angle. So number one, the first P of the five P's is product. And your product usually is going to be determined by the physical appearance of your product. Does it look nice? For example, if we were trying to sell cars, the product is very important. How powerful is the product? What does the colors and the aesthetics of that vehicle look like? Is the leather plush? What is the appearance and the structure? Actually, what is the product? What is its value to the customer? Now if we look at a car in this example, the warranty is actually another part of the marketing mix because it is part of the product. And you're putting a warranty on the product that's value to the customer. And therefore that's part of the first P product. If you look at dealerships like in our example of vehicles, they brag about all those elements of the product, whether it be its appearance and they make it look sexy and make it look really good looking and strong and powerful. They also advertise, they also market about their warranty, about the product. The quality of a product is also very integral to that first P, the product. We're talking about the product. We're talking about marketing the product element of your business. And if we're looking at a vehicle, we've talked about the vehicle itself. Now we're also looking at the quality. What's the quality of the materials? What is it made out of? This is where you start looking at the Ford vs. GM truck commercials. And they show quality of build. Another part that falls into the product part of your marketing mix is the packaging. And this is not another P, but it's part of the product category. And that is how do you package your product? The last thing that the product element of your marketing mix is going to include is just the functionality, like it does something for you. Again, this is all just the first p of the five Ps. But when we talk about the product, the functionality, what does it do for you? Like my cell phone, it allows me to make calls, it allows me to send emails and contact people. That's the functionality element of the marketing mix around the product. Now when I think about a company that really focuses on the product, I think about companies like Volvo. Volvo. When they put an ad out and they're marketing, they talk a lot about their product, the integrity, the quality. They talk about the safety of their product, all about the build and the warranty behind the product. It's very much built their marketing around the product itself, talking about safety and the horsepower and the structural design integrity all centered around the first P of the five P's. Now let's talk about the second P, which a lot of us get wrapped up in. And that is price. When I think about the P for price, I think about Walmart everyday. Low prices. That's their mantra. And it's all revolving around this element of the marketing mix, which is price every day, low prices. Very simply, they are trying to get customers by this P and that is using their price strategy. You must remember that pricing is a way of marketing because if you're going to price high, your way of marketing and advertising is gonna be completely different to different demographics of consumers. Whether they have money, what type of race, religion, sex, height, weight. All of those things are going to play into what type of customer is going to buy from you. And your pricing strategy is going to be a big element in terms of who you're actually targeting. Now we're gonna break down price even further because there's several things that you can use in your marketing to talk about price. The selling price itself is the thing we usually think about, like what is the cost, the selling price, but what about payments? Like, this is why the auto industry has done so well before this whole coronavirus. But the reason they were doing so well is cause they did leasing and they did financing in house. These were all ways of using the marketing and, and then channeling that towards the price. And what do they do on those advertisements? When you see the truck driving along the hills and the sports car speeding through the valley, what are those doing? Those are advertising their price based upon the lease or their payments per month. Another couple elements of pricing that can be used for marketing is price matching. You see this at Best Buy. You see there's a lot of retailers that are willing to match prices from online retailers because they're trying to save the business of the consumer. And they want to give the reassurance to the consumer that they are getting the bottom price and they're willing to do a price match. The terms of credit are also another way that you can market to the consumer using price. Because some people, they're not really caring about the payments or even the selling price. They care about the fact that they have bad credit and they need really good terms, or they want terms that don't allow for interest to be paid for three years or on their loan. These are all things you need to be thinking about when you talk about the pricing strategy of your business because it directly correlates to your marketing mix. Another popular element of the marketing mix is the third P, which is promotion. And this has a lot to do with advertising and what we traditionally think of as marketing. Super bowl commercials, billboards, all of those ads fall under promotion and in the marketing mix. Now let's talk about a couple elements of promotion that you might not have thought about before, though, in your marketing mix. Using promotions, sponsorships is another way to reach your customer and do marketing. You might sponsor a local high school team, or a sports team, or a choir or some sort of local event in your marketplace. And that all falls under the promotions mix of your marketing. All the media that you create in house, whether it be videos or audio podcasts, or any sort of pictures or content that you create around media. That's also another form of promotion that you can use in your marketing, one that we always think of for big businesses, but forget that small businesses can take advantage of this too. And it is PR or public relations. It's another form of promoting your business. And you can do it to your, you know, a small local newspaper, you can do it via social media to be able to promote your business using some sort of a promotion. Public relations to be able to get your message out and get publicity. This might come in the form of a press release to your local newspaper, like I mentioned, or doing some sort of promotion online that garners publicity around you, giving or sponsoring or doing something in the community that therefore gives you promoted activity on online. The fourth P is place. You might have heard time and time again in the restaurant industry that it's all about your location. Your location, your location. There's three things you must have for a good restaurant. That's your location, your location, your location. That falls under the place category of the five Ps. Now, place has a lot to do with where you're located because it has a lot to do with logistics. And if you are Somewhere in the supply chain, where your demographic, where are your target customers? Are they close to you? Where your store or location is, the place that you choose to do business in is also going to affect your distribution channels. So your vendors, your suppliers, and how your supply chain leads to you is going to be really governed by where you're located. Now, the fifth and final P is people. This has a lot to do with customer service and really who is on your team and who are you hiring? What do they look like? How do they treat the customers? Are they courteous? Are they professional? This is really important in the service industry where you're directly interacting with the customer, but it's also a way for you to really stand out of the crowd if you're not even in the service industry. For example, when we call Verizon, we are not impressed by their element of people. We are usually tired. The fact that it's someone over on the other side of the world that is answering the phone, or we're tired by the fact that they can't answer our calls. They're not trained. They don't know what we want. They don't have the power or authority to make calls or judgments. Whereas if you call Apple and you have a very different experience because their people have been trained in a certain way to be able to really become a marketing piece for the business. And if you look at all of five Ps, you might not think about where you're living, what place you're in. That's one P is even in a key advantage or something you could market to your customer. You might look at your pricing and say, well, that's not really anything special. That's another P. But it's actually a really fundamental element of your marketing plan. And I cannot overemphasize the importance of the final P. And that's people. How do your people react to the customers? How do they treat them? Do they even care? Are they professional? What do they look like? Are they sloppy? The attitude that your people have is usually directly correlated with you as the owner. And so all five of these P's, a lot of times you're going to have certain parts that you're stronger in, certain parts that you're weaker in. This fifth and final piece is one that is going to definitely allow you to create a lot of customer goodwill. When people call your company, when they walk into your store, when they get your product, when they actually interact one on one or over the phone or in person or with your people, what's that Marketing message giving because I promise you they're getting either a positive, negative or indifferent feeling towards your business when they interact with your people. And again, all businesses have their strengths and their weaknesses in all elements of the five Ps. For example, when we think about customer service, you might think about great companies like Zappos that have you call and they just have incredible customer service and their people are amazing and that is what they are known for. You have companies like Geico Insurance that all, all they focus on is the promotion. The third P, the promotion and advertising of their product is really the major element that we think of. We think about their Geico commercials. 15 minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance. That's what we think about because they focused on the third P promotion advertising as their marketing mix. Major. How I think about it is like when you go to school, you major in certain disciplines and then you might minor in other ones. And what I would really recommend you do is be known for one of these five P's Whether it's your place, your price, your promotion, your people or your product. Whatever P you want to focus on, be a major, be an industry leader in one of them and then make sure you mine earn other ones. Make sure that your price isn't so extremely expensive in order to be able to afford the great people. Guess what? Your customers are not going to care about your great people. If your price is so abhorrently more expensive than a comparable product. People are not going to care about your place. The fourth P that you're everywhere and you're on every single street corner, like Starbucks. They're everywhere. Especially in the Pacific Northwest where I'm from. They're everywhere. They've dominated place. But if their product was bad, it would tank all of the gains that they get from having a great place strategy. What I would recommend you do is look at all five of these elements. Product, price, promotion, place and people, as five different elements of your marketing mix and really dig into each and every single one of them and then you'll be able to figure out where you can actually improve. The five Ps is a simple element of marketing that stuck with me for many, many years. And when I'm driving down the road, going to a restaurant, doing anything out in the world, I am constantly thinking about the five Ps and where businesses can improve. Whether it be their bad pricing or their horrible advertisements, or maybe that their people are just abhorrently mean to me on customer Service, all the five Ps can be seen in every business and we can all improve. And I encourage you to, number one, educate yourself about the five Ps. Look them up online. This is not anything new I'm sharing. This is just a way of looking at your marketing mix. And again, it's a mix. There's five different P's, There's a mix to your marketing mix plan, and these are the five elements or ingredients that are necessary. You've been listening to Mike Andes on the Business Boot Camp podcast. Until next time, be great, because nothing else pays.