An Introductory Guide to Principles of Marketing in 2024

In today’s time, every business requires a marketing strategy as it lets your goods and services reach your potential customers and tells existing ones of new buying opportunities. Building the basis of that strategy requires four major core principles of marketing that effectively execute a marketing strategy. Knowing each of these marketing terms is the solution to building a strong strategy.

So, without any further ado, let’s move forward and learn about its basics. 

What are the principles of marketing?

Whenever we talk about basic marketing principles, they are four Ps of the marketing mix, which is a framework that supports marketing. By combining these four ingredients in several ways (hence the term marketing mix), you can create a synergy between all four marketing principles that drive product adoption within your target markets.

The marketing mix theory was founded in the 1950s and was filtered into the four Ps framework in the 1960s. It recognizes the key high-level areas to address as part of any marketing plan, such as a go-to-market approach for launching a product.

The elements that build up every area form the tactical components of a marketing strategy.

It’s essential to note down that the customer is the focal point of all areas in the marketing mix. Also, these areas are interdependent; they act together to complement each other and further align all the parts of a marketing plan.

Furthermore, the marketing mix is fluid, empowering the marketing team to highlight any area in the strategy as required based on market conditions and what’s most suitable for the targeted customer segment.

Four Principles of Marketing

Because the labels in the marketing mix are so wide, it’s important to review each in detail to know these four principles of marketing and how they work together.

Principle 1: Product

The marketing mix begins with the goods or services administered by the business. Anything sold to make revenue can be classified as part of the marketing mix, from creating razor blades to rendering legal advice.

The product should resolve a problem or need for the customer. It would help if you communicated the benefits of the product through the customer’s lens. You might believe that your product is excellent, but a sceptical customer desires to know what makes it distinct from your competitors and how it will satisfy their needs.

This means you need to understand the customer better than the product.

Ways you can know your customer:

• The buyer persona: The buyer persona is a customer characteristics profile that fits your offerings and can help you define the kinds of customers you’re targeting for the product. It further ensures an alignment between product benefits and customer requirements.
  
  
• Product branding: Consider how you desire customers to recognize the product’s brand. Is your product a superior-good or service? Is it useful, efficient, or economical? This influences how customers see your offering and how you may be required to name and package the product.
  
  
• Product life cycle: Learn where your product is in its product life cycle. Is it a new product, or maybe it’s been around a while? This influences how consumers react to the product. If it’s new, consumers are required to be educated about it. If it’s been around, maybe they’ve already tried it.

Principle 2: Price

This part of the marketing mix is about deciding the price for your goods or services.

There are several different strategies for pricing that you can use here. Still, finally, it’s about placing up your business and marketing purposes to understand what price the market will go.

You’ll be required to align pricing with the amount customers see for the product. This means you know the value of your offering from the customer’s view, which also involves their time and effort to get the product.

If customers see your offering as unique or of great value, you can charge more. On the other hand, if customers see the product as on par with contenders’ products, you may be required to discount your price below the competition to make customers.

Ways you can align your pricing with your customer:

• Pricing research: Conduct research to know the competitive landscape, what customers think of your products or services, and what internal stakeholders, like a sales team, have encountered when selling the product.
  
  
• Company goals: While the pricing policy you adopt should go with customer expectations, it should also support company goals. For instance, if the aim is to expand your customer base, you may require promotional pricing to convince new customers to try your offering.
  
  
• Test, evaluate, and repeat: Pricing is challenging to hit in the first attempt, so experiment with various pricing strategies until you get one that resonates with consumers and matches business objectives.

Principle 3: Place

This marketing mix part addresses where and how efficiently customers can get the goods or services. Is shopping possible online? For a service, what is the geographic area being served? For example, if you market your product to businesses, delivery points like getting your business clients will fall into this area.

Regularly providing an online destination, even if you give a service. Customers usually perform research online to discover purchasing options and make a decision. Without an online identity like a website, you’re providing your competitors with an advantage.

Ways to present customers a place to find you:

• Website alternatives: If your company does not have its website, even fixing up a presence on sites that your consumers daily can do the trick. For instance, businesses of all sizes have Facebook pages.
  
  
• Support mobile devices: Even if you own your site, is it mobile-friendly? It means the site has to look good and function adequately on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. If not, it can let your customer switch to another site.

Principle 4: Promotion

This area includes the tactics employed by the business to interact with customers across all of its marketing channels. This principle includes advertising, direct marketing methods, public relations, email marketing, social media, database marketing, communications strategies, special promotions, and in-person appearances (such as at a trade show). Given all it requires, the advertising part of the marketing mix includes perhaps the highest number of elements to shuffle. Because the selection of tools is broad, it’s important to analyze reviews like the best email marketing software.

Your choice of marketing tactics and tools should complement your marketing plan, which is pushed by your product positioning.

Create a product positioning statement that will act as the heart of promotion efforts. 

Ways to create a promotion:

• Positioning across tactics: Every promotional technique should echo components of the positioning statement so that its ideas thread through all your marketing. This produces a cohesive message to customers.
  
  
• Measurable goals: While developing promotional tactics for a marketing campaign, make sure that each has a measurable goal. Examples of measurable goals combine the number of visits to your website for a direct marketing campaign, brand lift percentages for a television ad, and email open rates for an email marketing campaign.

 

Wrap up

In this post, we have learned the principles of marketing and see how each of them work. These four Ps models live on today. Other frameworks have been developed, such as a seven Ps version for businesses selling services.

By aligning these four marketing principles to market your products or services to the target customer, you’ll accomplish this goal and expand your business.