The Four P's and Marketing Indicator Strategies

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Marketing indicator strategies are important in monitoring and implementing marketing strategies (as in the Marketing Mix or Four P's approach) in general, because they allow objective measurement of progress. Check additional information about Marketing Indicator.

Marketing is a broad discipline that is usually taken to cover the various processes, activities, and institutions involved in creating and distributing offerings or propositions that have value for the parties involved. Essentially, it deals with all the steps that take a product or service from the company or organization offering it all the way to the end consumer or client. Hence, marketing involves advertising, distribution, and selling, among other aspects. As with almost every other field in the modern business world, in recent years, it has become important to be able to use a marketing indicator or set of indicators to measure performance and track progress.

Drafting a comprehensive set of measures to track the entirety of a firm's marketing processes will be a long and involved process, not least because of the broad scope of marketing itself. At each step or stage in the process, and in terms of each aspect, there are many factors that can possibly be measured and thus considered. But basic guidelines can be found by subdividing the whole enterprise into four rough areas. From the supply side, or from the side of the company, these may be identified as Product, Promotion, Pricing, and Placement. Equivalently, if a more customer-oriented approach is desired, these may instead be referred to as Solution, Information, Value, and Access.

Product or Solution refers to the actual services and goods, their specifications, and how they relate to the consumer's wants and needs. Hence, the relevant measures or indicators would be those that describe the product or service itself, as well as customer reaction to the product or service. What is important to determine (and improve) is the adherence of the actual product to the desired specifications as set by the company, taking into consideration customer desires as well.

Promotion or Information would then refer to advertising, publicity, personal selling, and so on. This would encompass the various means and methods through which a company distributes information about it and the products it sells. The important indicators to note here would be those that measure the efficiency of this information transfer and how well these promotional materials are received. For instance, customer surveys as to their satisfaction with various advertisements could be undertaken.

Pricing or Value, on the other hand, refers to determining the optimal price for a particular product or service. This does not necessarily mean the monetary price, but also the time and effort exchanged for the service or product. The measures that would be most helpful in this aspect would be those that measure the competitiveness of a particular product's pricing.

Finally, Placement or Access refers to how the product or service actually gets to the customer. For instance, distribution and retailing would fall under this aspect of marketing. The consideration of demographics as well as geographical location would also be included here, as well as other choices regarding the composition and location of the target market. The use of a marketing indicator or set of indicators would be a great help in designing and implementing any marketing strategy.

If you are interested in Marketing Indicator, check this link to find out more about marketing metric. Also, you can check other articles in Strategic Planning category.

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