What is the Process in the Marketing Mix? An Expert's Guide

Learn about process as an essential element of service marketing mix (7P) & how it interacts meaningfully with other elements like product price place & promotion for holistic strategy.

What is the Process in the Marketing Mix? An Expert's Guide

The process is an essential element of the service marketing mix, or 7P. It refers to the flow of activities or mechanisms that take place when customers and companies interact. The four P's of marketing - product, price, place, and promotion - are often referred to as a marketing mix. These are the key elements involved in the planning and marketing of a product or service, and they interact meaningfully with each other.

Taking all of these elements into account is one way to approach a holistic marketing strategy. A marketing mix is a set of actions that companies and marketers use to help promote their brand or to sell a product or service they offer. When selling a new product or service, it's important to create a marketing mix strategy that essentially combines the key marketing ingredients to achieve the desired result. The marketing mix aims to concretize your marketing positioning. Often associated with the term “4P”, the goal of the marketing mix is to make your positioning tangible every time your brand is in contact with the consumer (so-called “touchpoints”).

Once the broad lines have been drawn, the analysis of the marketing mix requires going into detail. It is advisable to study the franchise opportunity, especially when ambitions are high in terms of geographical distribution of products. Covering a large territory requires significant resources. Therefore, a start-up with a high-demand product may need to resort to the franchise model to accelerate its implementation. This is a widespread model in the fast food industry.

In this part of the marketing mix, we'll focus on understanding how your marketing positioning can materialize through your human component. We will study the human part of the company's success, and customer satisfaction, as well as the role that employees play in transmitting brand values. This part of the marketing mix is to describe and analyze the processes surrounding the service. For your analysis to be pleasant, you need to focus on the most distinctive elements of the processes. Your marketing mix analysis can quickly overlook certain aspects and should go into detail where warranted. The last of the 7P is called “physical evidence”.

In the spirit of the marketing mix, they are the tangible elements that the customer is in contact with when buying the product. In this research, we propose to analyze the marketing mix of Ryanair, the Irish low-cost airline that is now number 1 airline in Europe. This evolution was carried out in 1981 by Booms and Bitner. For an overview of the history and development of the marketing mix, visit our guide. The needs analysis phase is classic in B2B and is usually done by sales staff.

In B2C, this needs analysis is rare, except when the product is distributed by a third party (retailer) who has a customer service department. However, for direct online sales, there are services that help guide consumers through product range (see “combining product marketing”). Interactive tools can be put online to guide customers to products that best suit them. Process refers to processes involved in delivering products and services to customers. It's also about being “easy to do business”. Add online scheduling to website for people to book appointments with you.

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Synchronize, store and edit all images and files in one place. Jenny Yang talks with 15 guests to reflect on elders who influenced them at right time. This 100-year-old candy store in St. Louis is rich in history and chocolate.

Fortunately, 7 Ps of marketing provide framework to use in marketing planning and essential strategy for effectively promoting yourself in target market. You can also consider elements of mix in daily marketing decision-making process with goal of attracting right audience to successfully market through your campaigns. Promotion is part of marketing mix that audience notices most. Includes TV and print advertising, content marketing, scheduled coupons or discounts, social media strategies, email marketing, display ads, digital strategies, marketing communication, search engine marketing, public relations and more.

People refer to anyone who comes in contact with customer even indirectly so make sure recruit top talent at all levels not just customer service and sales force. Prioritize processes that overlap with customer experience. The more specific and fluid your processes are easier your staff can carry them out. If staff isn't focused on navigating procedures they have more attention available to customers directly translating into exceptional and personal customer experiences.

If you receive more than one complaint from customer about process identify what is going wrong and find out how fix it. Develop your marketing mix and integrate it into your essentials. As you develop your mix consider how each element affects rest create unified brand experience for consumers from user experience to perceived value of product. Think about how price of product changes promotion strategy how specifications will contribute pricing and how employees carry out processes.

Make sure employees and tools they use can communicate with each other use right tools reach right people market research competitive analysis etc. Developing effective process requires understanding customer needs preferences behaviors etc.