The 4 p’s of marketing are product, package, price and promotion.

This series provides 20 questions to help you determine your best options concerning the 4 p’s of marketing. This first post on the 4 p’s of marketing answers the first four questions about your product:

• Who is the target market for your product?
• How well does your product’s features provide target market members’ the benefits they desire?
• How does your product compare with competing products?
• How does your product compare with buying trends, experiences?

4 P’s Of Marketing Product
Who Is The Target Market
For Your Product?

You’ll want to answer this first question with your best potential customers (target market) in mind.

First design your product to give your target market members what they want and need. Then build your marketing strategy and tactics to meet those wants and needs.

This requires that you learn everything you can about your target market members so that you can use that knowledge to make your marketing decisions.

4 P’s Of Marketing Product How Well Does Your Product’s Features Provide Target Market Members The Benefits They Desire?

Once you know your target market well, you’ll know what benefits they want in a product like yours. Then you incorporate those benefits into your product. But if you’ve already created your product, knowing your target market will enable you to determine which features to highlight in your marketing.

4 P’s Of Marketing Product How Does Your Product Compare With Competing Products?

You can read how to do such a comparison on another of my posts: The Effect Of Competition On Pricing Strategy You can access other posts related to competing products starting with the one below: Competitor Intelligence Statistics Then each post links to the next one in the series.

4 P’s Of Marketing Product How Does Your Product Compare With Buying Trends and Experiences?

You’ll want to know:

• the types of products that your target market buys,
• how well other products like yours have sold in the past, and
• sales statistics for competitive products.

This information will tell you approximately how well your product will sell. You can access the next post on the 4 p’ of marketing at 4 P’s Of Marketing: Product 2.

Would you like to learn marketing from one of the biggest names in marketing, Dan Kennedy? Dan’s offering loads of marketing tools in his Magnetic Marketing System.

You can get weekly summaries of my posts by completing the form below:

Posted 6-9-08:
4 P’s Of Marketing:
Product 1

This post deals with pricing strategies to answer the question: Can you maintain your prices over time?

Pricing strategies have been the topic of my past two posts. You can access them below:

Pricing Strategy: Extenuating Circumstances

The Effect Of Competition On Pricing Strategy

Today’s post on pricing strategies answers the questions:

• Will Prices Vary By The Amount Of Product Or Service Purchased?
• What Is It Costing You To Store Your Products?

Will Prices Vary By
The Amount Of Product
Or Service Purchased?

It’s a common pricing strategy to offer discounts to customers who buy in quantity, with the larger the quantity, the larger the discounts.

I’ve known of publishers who will sell for just a $1 profit per book if they can sell 5000 books at a time. Although that would provide only $5000 profit, the quick turn-around on investment can make it worthwhile.

What Is It Costing You
To Store Your Products?

It costs to have money invested in a product that’s just setting in storage. While in storage, products generate no cash flow or return on investment. So an immediate $5000 profit on a $50,000 investment may be a better pricing strategy than selling for a larger profit over a course of three years.

Of course, you can always have more of the product produced and will likely get your second order cheaper than your first because the first order absorbed the set-up costs. So the second order of 5000 may actually produce an even greater profit than the first would have sold if you sold it at retail.

Thus, providing quantity discounts and selling more products quickly provide potentially profitable pricing strategies for small businesses.

To read the next post in this series on pricing strategies, click the following link: Pricing Strategies: Price Consistency.

Discover how to Raise Prices Without Losing Sales and get 46 tactics that can fatten your bank account.

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Posted 5-15-08: Pricing Strategies:
Quantity Discounts

The effect of competition on pricing strategy covers the second of four posts on pricing strategy.

You can access the first post by clicking the link below:

Pricing Strategy: Extenuating Circumstances

This post answers the following questions:

• How do competitors price similar products and services?
• How do their strengths and weaknesses compare to yours?

What Is The Price Range
Of Products Like Yours?

All products have a price range from the lowest price to the highest. For some kinds of products, that range is broad while for others it is narrow.

The effect of competition on pricing strategy requires that you consider this price range and where your price should be within that price range. You determine the best price range according to your product’s strengths and weaknesses compared to competitors’ products.

How Your Price Competition
Determines Your Price

If your product has the most strengths, you can price it on the high end. If your product offers few benefits compared to competitors’, your price needs to be on the low end. So the effect of competition on pricing strategy requires an analysis of your and your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses.

Other Product Considerations

You need to know how your competitors’ quality, price, service, payment terms, location and reputation differ from yours. Because these all relate to benefits for customers.

Perhaps one of your competitors is a large corporation that sells a similar product to yours, but sells in volume for a much lower price. You can’t compete on price and still make enough profit to stay in business.

So what do you offer that will enable your product to compete? Perhaps your product provides better quality or you provide better customer service. Maybe you can offer better payment terms to induce your customers to buy. If so these become your benefits to customers. They are competitive strengths that effect your pricing strategy.

How Does Your
Product Compare?

So how do you compare to your competitors’ in strengths and weaknesses? You can visualize how you compare by making a table like the “Table To Illustrate The Effect Of Competition On Pricing Strategy” above.

Include at least your major competitors in the columns and a list of potential strengths and weaknesses in rows.

Then put a plus, minus or check mark in each column across the row for each competitor and for your own business or product. If a pricing criteria is a strength use a plus. If it’s a weakness use a minus. If it just meets expectations, use a check mark.

You can even go so far as to assign a number to each mark to get an overall score for your product and each of your competitors. For instance you could assign a three for each plus, a two for each check mark, and a one for each minus. Then add the scores for all pricing criteria to indicate each one’s competitive strength.

Or you can just look for places where you are strong and your competitors are weak. Using the table, it’s easy to see which characteristic best separates you from your competitors. Or in marketing language, you can easily determine your distinguishing characteristic. For example, the table above reveals that the business owner beats all major competitors on features and service.

That’s where the business owner has a plus, but the competitors have a minus or check mark. So this business owner’s distinguishing characteristic should be one or both of these criteria, and should determine pricing strategy and marketing activities.

Delving Further Into
Your Product’s Strengths

If you also have a features strength, you may want to do the table again for individual features to determine exactly which features offer your customers the most benefit and then make that your distinguishing characteristic.

But remember customers aren’t interested in features. They are interested in what a feature does for them or the benefit related to the feature.

If you presently don’t have a strength where your competitors are weak, determine if you can realistically and profitably develop a strength in that area. If you decide you can, then include the development of that strength in your pricing strategy and consider it in all your business and marketing decisions.

In this way you can consider the effect of competition on pricing strategy.

To get to the next post in this series, click on the following link: Pricing Strategies – Quantity Discounts

If you’re an Internet marketer, I recommend Nichebot for gathering information on your competitors. You can read a brief review that I recently wrote about Nichebot for another post.

To read the next post in this series on pricing strategy, click the link below:

Pricing Strategies – Quantity Discounts

Discover how to Raise Prices Without Losing Sales and get 46 tactics that can fatten your bank account.

Like this post? You can get weekly summaries of my posts by completing the form below:

Posted 5-13-08:
The Effect of Competition
on Pricing Strategy

Pricing strategies will be the topic of the next four posts on this blog.
Each of these posts will answer a question that will help you with your pricing strategies.

The first question regarding pricing strategies is:

What Extenuating
Circumstances Should Influence
Your Product’s Price?

This part of your pricing strategies includes the exclusivity of the product, whether or not others provide a similar product, and how high the market demand is for the product.

For example, I have had Migraine headaches since my late 30’s. For years, pain pills that temporarilly mask the pain were the only medication available. I’d take them for about nine months, and then they would loose their effectiveness.  I’d have to get off of them for three months out of every year. During that time, all I could do was suffer.

In the early 1990s, Imitrix came out. Instead of masking the pain, it actually decreases the size of blood vessels that cause the pain, and it works in about 30 minutes.

Let me tell you, there was a market demand for that product, and because it was the first product to effectively treat Migraines, the cost for Imitrix was and continues to be high, but I gladly pay it and am grateful to the person who invented Imitrix.

Develop A Product With
High Market Demand
And No Competition

If you can create a product with such high market demand and for which there is no competition, you can also charge a high price for your product.

If you are not fortunate enough to invent a new product with a high market demand, you will have competitors. How they price their similar products will influence what you can charge for your product.

Thus, the market demand and the amount of competition for your product are important considerations in your pricing strategies.

To get to the next post in this series, click on the link: The Effect Of Competition On Pricing Strategy.

Discover how to Raise Prices Without Losing Sales and get 46 tactics that can fatten your bank account.

Get weekly summaries of my posts and assure that you never miss one to help you better market your business. Just complete the form below:

Posted : Pricing Strategies:
Extenuating Circumstances