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The Four 'P's of Marketing:
Product, Place, Price and Promotion 

In one of my favorite "Dilbert" comic strips, the gag is "Welcome to Marketing. Three drink minimum." It’s a good joke with some basis in reality. A big part of marketing IS building relationships. It’s good to make an office call or keep in touch on the telephone with your clients. When you’re working on a big deal, though, you might want to get them out of the office so that they’re not answering their phone or taking questions from their people. Whether it’s a simple breakfast over coffee and a bagel or a very elaborate junket to a major sporting event, you get the chance to get to know them better and find out what they want in a more relaxed setting. You also get to tell them how your business can help them out when they’re not trying to deal with other situations.

So what is marketing? Is it sales? Is it advertising? Marketing is the part of your business where money is made. You let people know that you’ve got a product they want, you sell it to them and deliver to them and they pay you. You make a profit; they’ve got the product or service that they need. To make it easy, marketing people break it down into product, place, price and promotion. They’re referred to as the four "P’s" of marketing. They’re also what people are talking about when you hear about a "marketing mix." You want to find a good marketing mix for your clients so that you can make money.

"Products" are the things that you sell to people. You might also have a service that they’ll pay for as your product. Products can range all of the way from goods people need every day to live, like milk, tuna or vegetables or they can be very high end dream products, like a private jet. Having the right product for your target market (that’s the people or businesses you want to sell to) requires knowing what they need and want.

"Place" refers to how you get your product to your customer. Your product might be something that you produce or it could be something you never see or touch. That’s quite possible if you have customers order through you and you arrange to have it directly drop shipped to them from the maker or a fulfillment center. There are a lot of ways to get your product to your customer, so it’s important to know if it’s something they want to see and touch before they buy it. If so, you’ll probably want to order and stock it and sell it directly from your business. If it’s something they don’t need to see before buying it, you need to make sure that it’s delivered promptly to them and is what they expected when they bought it.

"Price" is pretty self-explanatory but it’s very important to your success. Price something too high and you may never sell a single item of it. Price it too low and you can lose money on every sale once all of your costs of doing business are considered. So you want to price it attractively so that you can sell it to your clients and they’ll feel good about the purchase.

"Promotion" is how you let people know what you’ve got for sale. It includes most of the things you think of when "marketing" is mentioned, like advertising and personal sales calls. You can use a variety of tools to promote your product or service, like direct mail, sales brochures, contests and giveaways. The purpose of promotion is to get people to know what your product is, what they can use it for, to make them really want your product and to let them know that YOU have it and that they can buy it from you. You want them to think of you whenever they’re thinking about your product. Your competitors may be wonderful people, kind to children and always good neighbors. But you want the customers who are looking for the product to know that you can do it better for them than your competitors can. Maybe you can do it cheaper. Maybe you’ve got a better product. Maybe you’ve got it in stock and they don’t. Maybe they’ll have more fun buying it from you and you’ll provide the customer service that makes them feel special and lets them be worry free when they purchase from you.

In any case, you control the product, place, price and promotion of what you’re offering for sale. Your marketing mix should be something you pay careful attention to because that’s how your business will succeed.