THE NEW MARKETING MIX

A new paradigm concerning the relationship between the company and the customer has emerged. Formerly, it was stated that the Marketing Mix – the four concepts of marketing on which companies base their efforts towards creating strategies of sales and communication to the customer – was made up of four basic concepts called the 4 Ps: Product, Price, Place and Promotion. Even I, studying International Negotiations, learnt these four concepts as the elements of Marketing Mixes throughout several of my major’s subjects. Nevertheless, the present is introducing us to a change of concepts. The Marketing Mix presents a new paradigm, in which the four elements that compose it are better describing it through being 4 Cs: Client, Cost, Convenience and Communication.

I think that these new concepts have the same fundamentals as those from the former paradigm, but are more comprehensive and in-line with the current state of market. Clients are currently seeking more when purchasing a product or hiring a service. Competence is so wide, being a highly globalized world in which one’s competitors are no longer in the same country or even the same continent, that customers can demand not only the final good or service that they mainly seek, but a complete purchasing experience, that will make them decide amongst brands that, because of the same globalization, mainly, are each day more similar and have to struggle more to become unique.

For this situation it is that the New Paradigm was created, changing the concept “Price” for “Cost”, since a client is not only paying a monetary value for a product, but also other kinds of prices that are involved in the purchasing decision and in the experience that comes after buying. Also, and more in focus with the main subject of this whole course, clients are looking for more than just promotion – they seek ‘Communication’ with the company. The idea that they have of a brand influences widely on the decision they make to purchase from it and this idea is formed by what the client has heard or learned about the brand. Thus, companies spend great efforts on creating communication strategies that go directly to the mind of their target markets, controlling to the best extent possible this idea, in their favor, to incite the client to act upon it and purchase from them.

References:

ITESM RUV. (2010). Marketing Communication – Topic 1. [Video] Retrieved from the Blackboard Platform.

Marketing communications in business decision-making

The world is constantly changing, and every day, the pace of this change is more rapid. It affects not just the environment, or knowledge, but also how people think, what they believe, and the way in which they communicate.

Marketers have to take this into account when they try to approach a potential customer through an advertising campaign, so that they can make sure that the message they are trying to convey reaches the customers in such a way that they will receive it, adopt it, understand it the way it was meant to be understood, and take it into practice, in other words –purchase.

But customers are more complex every time, and the way in which they see the world is more and more related and linked to the set of beliefs, experiences and knowledge that they carry, and so the message that companies launch are received in millions of different ways. So it becomes harder to make one single message have the same effect in millions of such unique minds.

For example, imagine a company that sells ice-cream. Pretend that the company’s brand image, the mascot, so to say, is a dog. There are most certainly millions of people who love dogs and think they are funny, cute, and might feel attracted to the brand if the advertisement shows a really beautiful collie in a prairie under the bright sun, licking an ice-cream cone from the hand of a cute-but-not-so-much-as-the-dog child. They would look for the brand of the gorgeous collie in the supermarket freezers. On the contrary, to me personally and probably my mother too, the advertisement would result disgusting. We are in the minority of people who feel dogs are dirty and smelly animals who should definitely not be licking ice-cream from the cone of a kid who will at least get some kind of stomach infection. We love ice-cream, and buy it regularly, but would never go for the brand that’s being advertised by the cute kid and smelly dog.