Marketing Mix and Product Life Cycle

This assignment focuses on the concept of marketing mix, which is crucial for firms to attract a large number of consumers towards their products or services. The marketing mix consists of four Ps: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. Additionally, it discusses product life cycle, pricing strategies, distribution channels, and promotional methods to effectively execute marketing activities. By applying the concept of marketing mix, firms can make informed business decisions and achieve success in the market.

Introduction to
Marketing

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................1
TASK 1............................................................................................................................................1
P1 Use of marketing techniques to market products in two organisations................................1
P2 Limitations and constraints of marketing..............................................................................2
TASK 2............................................................................................................................................3
P3 Use of marketing research for the development of marketing plan.....................................3
Data Types..............................................................................................................................3
P4 Use of marketing research for marketing planning................................................................4
TASK 3............................................................................................................................................5
P5 How and why groups of customers are targeted for selected products..................................5
TASK 4............................................................................................................................................6
P6 Marketing mix for a new product or service..........................................................................6
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................7
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................8

INTRODUCTION
Marketing is a process of using various tools or techniques to inform customers about the
company's product an influence them to buy the same (Palmer, 2012). For this a firm can use
various communication tools or mix of communications tools including television, radio,
newspapers or many more. It is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating,
communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients,
partners, and society at large. Present report is based on how enterprises can use this concept on
order to attract large number of customers. Limitations of marketing is discussed under this
report. Along with this use of marketing research for making marketing plan is detailed under
this.
TASK 1
P1 Use of marketing techniques to market products in two organisations
British Red Cross
British Red Cross Society is the United Kingdom branch of the worldwide and is volunteer-led
humanitarian organisation that helps people in crisis, whoever and wherever they are. They
enable vulnerable people at home and overseas to prepare them for and respond to emergencies
in their own communities.
Apple
Apple is worldly known for its brand and it is an American multinational corporation
headquartered in Cupertino that designs, develops and sells their products to consumers. popular
products that are currently on demand are iPhone, Macs, and iPod.
Growth Strategy
A growth strategy is when a company invests in companies and sectors that are rapidly
expanding than their rivalries (Malhotra and Malhotra, 2012). Benefits using growth strategy
could be cheaper production costs through the economies of scale and helping business receive
high levels of products. Apple has used these four techniques.
Apples branding strategy
A brand can be a name, logo, slogan or the service. Brand recognition enables the
customers to notice their products than to other similar products for instance Apples relies on
branding while selling their iPhone products this is because the consumers are already aware of
the luxurious product due to the famous apple logo, this entices the consumers to pay whatever
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the price may be because the demand for the product will be so high. Branding helps Apple
become a well renowned established company and the relation between the consumer and the
brand forms because the customers can easily identify what is a brand and could result to
continuous sales if they prefer apple brand than, android for instance.
British Red cross Relationship marketing
The process of bringing the buyers and sellers together, forming a strong in tact bond is known
as relationship marketing.
 Lifetime Customers: A lifetime customer is someone who remains a loyal to the brand
and for British Red Cross it is essential that they "now details of each of their customers,
so if they need to update their customers with any forthcoming events or need help to
raise funding then they could use their personal details to inform them.
P2 Limitations and constraints of marketing
When a person buy a product or service, there are laws which have been created to
protect him (Molesworth, Scullion and Nixon, 2010). These laws affect the activities of firms in
following ways: Sale Of Goods Legislation 1979 Act: This law means that the person selling the product
or service, has the legal right to do so. If you are selling goods by description, such as
newspaper, or catalogue, the goods have to correspond with the description. This also
applies to selling goods by sample - the rest of the goods have to have the same quality of
the sample product. This applies to both British Red Cross and Apple. British red cross
have the legal right to sell their products, however they don't sell by description in
newspaper as they show pictures and promote the cereal instead of describing it, they also
don't sell in catalogues. Apple also have the legal right to sell their products, and they do
sell by catalogue, so their products have to correspond to their description. Consumer Protection From Unfair Trading: This law is to ensure traders act honestly
and fairly towards their customers. This applies both to British Red Cross and Apple, as
their customers are purchasing goods/services from them. Consumer Credit: This law requires most businesses that lend money to customers or
offer goods and services on credit or engage on certain credit activities to be licenced by
OFT (Armstrong and et. al., 2011). Trading without a licence in such cases is a criminal
offence and can result in a fine and/or imprisonment. This doesn't not apply to British
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Red Cross as they don't offer credit for their products, however Apple do offer credit
accounts / catalogues for their products. Consumer Protection: This law is aimed at making sure that businesses act fairly
towards their customers, this applies to both British Red Cross and Apple, and they sell
products to customers. This will allow customers to be protected, and businesses treat
them fairly.
 Distance Selling: A lot of people buy products and services online, through the mail and
over the phone (Sheth and Sisodia, 2015). These are all examples of distance selling.
Business that normally sell by distance means they have systems in place for trading this
way, such as letters and emails they send to customers they death with from a distance.
These businesses need to comply with the consumer protection ( Distance Selling)
regulations 2000. This would not apply to British Red Cross. Apple however do sell their
products internationally online, and through the mail so they would have to comply with
the regulations act.
TASK 2
P3 Use of marketing research for the development of marketing plan
Research is an important tool, it helps organisations to discover what is happening in
their marketing environment. There are many examples of organisations failing because they did
not respond to changes in their marketing environment. Organisations need to be proactive and
change in line with their marketing environment.
Data Types
Researchers collect two types of data
 Qualitative Data: Focuses on people’s opinions and attitudes towards a product or
service. It focuses on the reasons behind people's opinions and motivation (Smith, 2012).
Typical ways to collect qualitative data include focus groups, questionnaires, interviews
and observations of people in a specific setting.
Qualitative data usually involves small groups of people or individuals so that researchers can
fully explore why people "feel" the way they do. Researchers will be looking for detailed
answers from the people participating in the research. Qualitative data collection is invaluable for
product design and marketing research.
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 Quantitative Data: Focuses on collecting data which can be organised into numerical
analysis. It may still focus on people's attitudes but its about what they think from a
numerical point of view (Skålén and Hackley, 2011). For example rating something on a
scale of 1 to 10 or collecting data to calculate what percentage of people like a product.
As quantitative data is research which will be used for numerical analysis, the questions
used to collect it are usually narrow and specific. The questions also require a short and
simple answer for example yes/no or a number.
P4 Use of marketing research for marketing planning
Marketing is the process of developing and implementing a plan to identify, anticipate
and satisfy consumer demand, in such a way as to make a profit. The two main elements of this
plan are market research to identify and anticipate customer requirements and the planning of an
appropriate marketing mix to meet these requirements. Market research involves gathering and
recording information about consumers, market, product, and the competition in an organised
way. The information is then analysed and used to inform marketing decisions. There are three
main ways of gathering information for market research:
1. From internal information already held by an organisation, e.g. details of existing
customers and their spending habits (Proctor, 2014).
2. External primary information - i.e. information collected at first hand by interviewing
customers and potential customers to get their views about a company, products and
services.
3. External secondary information - using published sources of information e.g. those
produced by marketing organisations about products, markets and brands.
Marketing planning:
1. To assess how well the organisation is doing in its markets.
2.To identify current strengths and weaknesses in these markets.
3. To establish marketing objectives to be achieved in these markets.
4. To establish a marketing mix for each market designed to achieve organisational objectives.
Organisations like the British Red Cross and Apple will carry out marketing to find out
about the sort of service that their customers and clients require in order to create an appropriate
marketing plan.
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A simple definition of market research is 'keeping those who provide goods and services
in touch with the needs and wants of those who buy the goods and services.'
TASK 3
P5 How and why groups of customers are targeted for selected products.
Market segmentation is an idea of how the market is made up of different groups of
people. These different segments include different groups with the same wants, purchasing
power, geographical location, buying attitude or habits. Segmenting a market helps a business to
design products that these different segments want to buy to ensure that they can get the
maximum profit possible, they also figure out how much they would be able to sell the product
for which would increase demand (Barile and et. al., 2012). There is a typical way that
businesses may segment their market and this is by dividing the consumers into geographic,
demographic, psycho-graphic, social culture.
Apple Demographical bases: Looking into Apple, the Demographical market segment is
successful because they are developing products on the age, life cycle, occupation of the
people. They are distributing their products into various places and the PCs are
categorized on age, family size, for example they would have more games and
entertainment in the PCs for the kids and a professional PC with all the latest software's. Geographical bases: Looking into the geographical bases of Apple they have established
their business all over the world like U.S., South America, Europe, Japan, and Australia.
Recently Apple chose to implement a vertical growth strategy and began expanding their
own retail stores. The company also sells its product via third-parties dealers, or via
internet through their own website or through the iTunes online music stores. Behaviour bases: In this market segment Apple providing good product knowledge to the
customers by advertising on search engines, T.V. as they have a very good brand image.
Using this brand image they are continuously coming up with new ideas and products and
attracting the customers (Babin and Zikmund, 2015). Apple has got a very good response
rate as many of the customers are looking for new designs and innovative products which
Apple is successfully delivering.
 Psycho graphic bases: Looking into Apple the psycho graphic market segment is
successful because they are developing products on the lifestyle of the people such as
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Mac book for the younger generation. Apple having a very good brand image has very
good value for its products as they are different and innovative. Looking into the
personality (style) sector Apple is providing their products with different colors for the
people who like fancy colours.
British red cross
British red cross provide its services to large number of services without any
segmentation.
TASK 4
P6 Marketing mix for a new product or service
Marketing mix:The marketing mix consists of the 4P's (Wilson and et. al., 2012). One
must explain each stage in the proposed marketing mix
Product - discuss the product or service using the points below.
Product range
Benefits and features of product or service for target market
Product life cycle
Price - What pricing strategy will one use? One can use more than one over a period of
time.
Premium pricing
Penetration pricing
Economy pricing
Skimming
Psychological pricing
Captive product pricing
Product line pricing
Place - Where is the product or service sold? How does it get to the customer?
Distribution
Online or physical presence
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Promotion - promotional mix. Explain how one will going to make the target market
aware of the product. There a several methods one can use.
Advertising (different media/ on line techniques)
Personal selling
Public relations
Sales promotion
CONCLUSION
From the above information it can be concluded that it is very important for every firm to
effectively execute its marketing activities. By effectively applying the concept of marketing mix
firm can attract large number of consumers towards its products or service. Marketing research
help a firm in collecting large number of relevant data which provide assistant to marketing
manager while making business plan for the firm.
REFERENCES
Books and journals:
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Palmer, A., 2012. Introduction to marketing: theory and practice. Oxford University Press.
Malhotra, N. K. and Malhotra, N.K., 2012. Basic marketing research: Integration of social
media. Boston: Pearson.
Molesworth, M., Scullion, R. and Nixon, E. eds., 2010. The marketisation of higher education.
Routledge.
Armstrong, G and et. al., 2011. Marketing: an introduction (Vol. 10). NJ: Pearson.
Sheth, J. N. and Sisodia, R. S., 2015. Does marketing need reform?: Fresh perspectives on the
future. Routledge.
Wilson, A and et. al., 2012. Services marketing: Integrating customer focus across the firm.
McGraw Hill.
Smith, A., 2012. Introduction to sport marketing. Routledge.
Proctor, T., 2014. Strategic marketing: an introduction. Routledge.
Skålén, P. and Hackley, C., 2011. Marketing-as-practice. Introduction to the special issue.
Barile, S and et. al., 2012. An introduction to the viable systems approach and its contribution to
marketing.
Babin, B. J. and Zikmund, W. G., 2015.Exploring marketing research. Cengage Learning.
Online
Marketing mix. 2017. [Online]. Available through:
<http://www.marketingteacher.com/marketing-mix/>. [Accessed on 17th July 2017].
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