The Marketing Mix and the 4Ps of Marketing

The marketing mix and the 4Ps of marketing are often used as synonyms for one another. In fact, they are not necessarily the same thing.

"Marketing mix" is a general phrase used to describe the different kinds of choices organizations have to make in the whole process of bringing a product or service to market. The 4Ps is one way – probably the best-known way – of defining the marketing mix, and was first expressed in 1960 by E. J. McCarthy in his book, "Basic Marketing - A Managerial Approach."

The 4Ps are:

• Product (or Service).
• Place.
• Price.
• Promotion.

A good way to understand the 4Ps is by the questions that you need to ask to define your marketing mix. Here are some questions that will help you understand and define each of the four elements:

Product/Service

• What does the customer want from the product/service? What needs does it satisfy?
• What features does it have to meet these needs?
  • Are there any features you've missed out?
  • Are you including costly features that the customer won't actually use?
• How and where will the customer use it?
• What does it look like? How will customers experience it?
• What size(s), color(s), and so on, should it be?
• What is it to be called?
• How is it branded?
• How is it differentiated versus your competitors?
• What is the most it can cost to provide and still be sold sufficiently profitably? (See also Price, below.)

Place

• Where do buyers look for your product or service?
• If they look in a store, what kind? A specialist boutique or in a supermarket, or both? Or online? Or direct, via a catalog?
• How can you access the right distribution channels?
• Do you need to use a sales force? Or attend trade fairs? Or make online submissions? Or send samples to catalog companies?
• What do your competitors do, and how can you learn from that and/or differentiate?

Price

• What is the value of the product or service to the buyer?
• Are there established price points for products or services in this area?
• Is the customer price sensitive? Will a small decrease in price gain you extra market share? Or will a small increase be indiscernible, and so gain you extra profit margin?
• What discounts should be offered to trade customers, or to other specific segments of your market?
• How will your price compare with your competitors?

Promotion

• Where and when can you get your marketing messages across to your target market?
• Will you reach your audience by advertising online, in the press, on TV, on radio, or on billboards? By using direct marketing mailshots? Through PR? On the internet?
• When is the best time to promote? Is there seasonality in the market? Are there any wider environmental issues that suggest or dictate the timing of your market launch or subsequent promotions?
• How do your competitors do their promotions? And how does that influence your choice of promotional activity?

Using the 4Ps of Marketing

The model can be used to help you decide how to take a new offer to market. It can also be used to test your existing marketing strategy. Whether you are considering a new or existing offer, follow the steps below to help you to define and improve your marketing mix.

1. Start by identifying the product or service that you want to analyze.
2. Now go through and answer the 4Ps questions – as defined in detail above.
3. Try asking "why" and "what if" questions too, to challenge your offer. For example, ask why your target audience needs a particular feature. What if you drop your price by 5 percent? What if you offer more colors? Why sell through wholesalers rather than direct channels? What if you improve PR rather than rely on online advertising?
4. Once you have a well-defined marketing mix, try "testing" the overall offer from the customer's perspective, by asking customer focused questions:
   1. Does it meet their needs? (Product.)
   2. Will they find it where they shop? (Place.)
   3. Will they consider that it's priced favorably? (Price.)
   4. And will the marketing communications reach them? (Promotion.)
5. Keep on asking questions and making changes to your mix until you are satisfied that you have optimized your marketing mix, given the information and facts and figures you have available.
6. Review your marketing mix regularly, as some elements will need to change as the product or service and its market grow, mature and adapt in an ever-changing competitive environment.

Rumelt's Criteria for Evaluating Strategies

Richard Rumelt developed four criteria for evaluating strategies:
Consistency
    Are the external strategies consistent with (supported by) the various internal aspects of the organization? You must examine all the various functional and internal management strategies employed by the organization and compare them with the external business strategy.
Consonance
    Are the strategies in agreement with the various external trends (and sets of trends) in the environment? To answer this questions, you need to look at all the major trends that impact the selected strategy - both positively and negatively. 
Feasibility
    Is the strategy reasonable in terms of the organization's resources?

·         Money and capital

·         Management, professional, and technical resources

·         Time span

Advantage
    Does the strategy create and/or maintain a competitive advantage?

·         Resources

·         Skills

·         Position

CONSISTENCY

A strategy should not present inconsistent goals and policies. Organizational conflict and interdepartmental bickering are often symptoms of a managerial disorder, but these problems may also be a sign of strategic inconsistency. There are three guidelines to help determine if organizational problems are due to inconsistencies in strategy:

• If managerial problems continue despite changes in personnel and if they tend to be issue-based rather than people-based, then strategies may be inconsistent.
• If success for one organizational department means, or is interpreted to mean, failure for another department, then strategies may be inconsistent.
• If policy problems and issues continue to be brought to the top for resolution, then strategies may be inconsistent.

CONSONANCE

Consonance refers to the need for strategists to examine sets of trends as well as individual trends in evaluating strategies. A strategy must represent an adaptive response to the external environment and to the critical changes occurring within it. One difficulty in matching a firm's key internal and external factors in the formulation of strategy is that most trends are the result of interactions among other trends. For example, the day care explosion came about as a combined result of many trends that included a rise in the average level of education, increased inflation, and an increase in women in the workforce. Although single economic or demographic trends might appear steady for many years, there are waves of change going on at the interaction level.

FEASIBILITY

A strategy must neither overtax available resources nor create unsolvable subproblems. The final broad test of strategy is its feasibility; that is, can the strategy be attempted within the physical, human, and financial resources of the enterprise? The financial resources of a business are the easiest to quantify and are normally the first limitation against which strategy is evaluated. It is sometimes forgotten, however, that innovative approaches to financing are often possible. Devices such as captive subsidiaries, sale-leaseback arrangements, and tying plant mortgages to long-term contracts have all been used effectively to help win key positions in suddenly expanding industries. A less quantifiable, but actually more rigid, limitation on strategic choice is that imposed by individual and organizational capabilities. In evaluating a strategy, it is important to examine whether an organization has demonstrated in the past that it possesses the abilities, competencies, skills, and talents needed to carry out a given strategy.

ADVANTAGE

A strategy must provide for the creation and/or maintenance of a competitive advantage in a selected area of activity. Competitive advantages normally are the result of superiority in one of three areas: 1) resources, 2) skills, or 3) position. The idea that the positioning of one's resources can enhance their combined effectiveness is familiar to military theorists, chess players, and diplomats. Position can also play a crucial role in an organization's strategy. Once gained, a good position is defensible—meaning that it is so costly to capture that rivals are deterred from full-scale attacks. Positional advantage tends to be self-sustaining as long as the key internal and environmental factors that underlie it remain stable. This is why entrenched firms can be almost impossible to unseat, even if their raw skill levels are only average. Although not all positional advantages are associated with size, it is true that larger organizations tend to operate in markets and use procedures that turn their size into advantage, while smaller firms seek product/market positions that exploit other types of advantage. The principal characteristic of good position is that it permits the firm to obtain advantage from policies that would not similarly benefit rivals without the same position. Therefore, in evaluating strategy, organizations should examine the nature of positional advantages associated with a given strategy.

S.M.A.R.T

SMART goals

You could say that the whole human endeavour is geared towards setting and achieving goals. Goals are part of every aspect of life: how you conduct your relationships, what you want to achieve at work, the way you use your spare time... Everything comes down to priorities, and what you would like to accomplish in every aspect – whether you make a conscious choice or go with subconscious preferences.

Without setting goals or objectives, life becomes a series of chaotic happenings you don't control. You become the plaything of coincidence. Accomplishments like sending someone to the moon, inventing the iPod etcetera are the result of a goal that was set at some point. A vision that was charted and realised.

What is SMART goal setting?

SMART goal setting brings structure and trackability into your goals and objectives. In stead of vague resolutions, SMART goal setting creates verifiable trajectories towards a certain objective, with clear milestones and an estimation of the goal's attainabililty. Every goal or objective, from intermediary step to overarching objective, can be made S.M.A.R.T. and as such, brought closer to reality.

In corporate life, SMART goal setting is one of the most effective and yet least used tools for achieving goals. Once you've charted to outlines of your project, it's time to set specific intermediary goals. With the SMART checklist, you can evaluate your objectives. SMART goal setting also creates transparency throughout the company. It clarifies the way goals came into existence, and the criteria their realisation will conform to.

What does S.M.A.R.T. goal setting stand for?

Why not think of a small goal you want to set right now, personal or professional. To make your goal S.M.A.R.T., it needs to conform to the following criteria: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely.

S.M.A.R.T. goal setting: Specific

What exactly do you want to achieve? The more specific your description, the bigger the chance you'll get exactly that. S.M.A.R.T. goal setting clarifies the difference between 'I want to be a millionaire' and 'I want to make €50.000 a month for the next ten years by creating a new software product'.

Questions you may ask yourself when setting your goals and objectives are:

• What exactly do I want to achieve?
• Where?
• How?
• When?
• With whom?
• What are the conditions and limitations?
• Why exactly do I want to reach this goal? What are possible alternative ways of achieving the same?

S.M.A.R.T. goal setting: Measurable

Measurable goals means that you identify exactly what it is you will see, hear and feel when you reach your goal. It means breaking your goal down into measurable elements. You'll need concrete evidence. Being happier is not evidence; not smoking anymore because you adhere to a healthy lifestyle where you eat vegetables twice a day and fat only once a week, is.

Measurable goals can go a long way in refining what exactly it is that you want, too. Defining the physical manifestations of your goal or objective makes it clearer, and easier to reach.

S.M.A.R.T. goal setting: Attainable

Is your goal attainable? That means investigating whether the goal really is acceptable to you. You weigh the effort, time and other costs your goal will take against the profits and the other obligations and priorities you have in life.

If you don't have the time, money or talent to reach a certain goal you'll certainly fail and be miserable. That doesn't mean that you can't take something that seems impossible and make it happen by planning smartly and going for it!

There's nothing wrong with shooting for the stars; if you aim to make your department twice as efficient this year as it was last year with no extra labour involved, how bad is it when you only reach 1,8 times? Not too bad...

S.M.A.R.T. goal setting: Relevant

Is reaching your goal relevant to you? Do you actually want to run a multinational, be famous, have three children and a busy job? You decide for yourself whether you have the personality for it, or your team has the bandwidth.

If you're lacking certain skills, you can plan trainings. If you lack certain resources, you can look for ways of getting them.

The main questions, why do you want to reach this goal? What is the objective behind the goal, and will this goal really achieve that?

You could think that having a bigger team will make it perform better, but will it really?

S.M.A.R.T. goal setting: Timely

Time is money! Make a tentative plan of everything you do. Everybody knows that deadlines are what makes most people switch to action. So install deadlines, for yourself and your team, and go after them. Keep the timeline realistic and flexible, that way you can keep morale high. Being too stringent on the timely aspect of your goal setting can have the perverse effect of making the learning path of achieving your goals and objectives into a hellish race against time – which is most likely not how you want to achieve anything.

SMART+ goals

Another thing that's very important when setting SMART goals, is formulating it POSITIVELY. Remember that what you focus on, increases. So when you focus on NOT doing something, all you think about is that thing. And it will increase. So don't 'stop procrastinating', but 'achieve a daily discipline'.

The 3 Job Analysis Methods Every HR Professional Needs To Know

Job analysis in human resource management (HRM) refers to the process of identifying and determining the duties, responsibilities, and specifications of a given job. It encompasses the collection of data required to put together a job description that will attract the right person to fill in the role. Job analysis in HRM helps establish the level of experience, qualifications, skills and knowledge needed to perform a job successfully.
Now, there are obviously a vast number of different techniques that facilitate the job analysis process that HR can use to ensure an employee is performing at their best (or if they are fit for the role at all).

However, we can really boil these down to 3 job analysis methods that every HR professional needs to know. 

Job Analysis Method: Interview

With this job analysis method, job analysts conduct interviews with incumbents to collect information about their tasks and how they are coping with them. Interviews can be structured and unstructured depending on your corporate culture.

Structured interviews follow a systematic approach where employees are interviewed accurately and consistently, following a preset format. In a structured interview, you typically see that:

• All interviewees are asked the same questions in the same order.
• Interviewers record, compare and evaluate answers against standardized criteria.
• The interview process remains the same even if the interviewer changes.

Thanks to this consistency, structured interviews have a high level of reliability and validity.

Unstructured interviews, on the other hand, unravel without a preset structure. The interview process is carried out as a conversation with no specific questions predefined. Nevertheless, the interviewer should make the purpose and focus of the interview clear to the employees. Namely, that the purpose of the interview is to understand their job role better in order to improve or modify their role. In an unstructured interview, you typically see that:

• Interviewees may receive different questions or the same questions may be asked in a different order.
• Interviewers don’t always use standardized criteria for recording, comparing and evaluating answers.
• The interview process varies depending on the interviewer.

Using interviews as the only job analysis method has several drawbacks, too. One disadvantage of using the interview job analysis method is that employees may exaggerate or omit vital details. To overcome this possible issue, HR professionals and job analysts should interview more than one employee in the same position (if applicable). This will provide more reliable results and data for the job analysts and HR professionals to work with.

Think of this as a scientific study where you need a larger pool of clients to make the results solid. You can't determine how a role works with only one person's opinion - you need a larger sample size to see what is the same and different across the board.

Job Analysis Method: Questionnaires

As the name suggests, the questionnaire job analysis method requires employees, supervisors, and managers to fill out forms, namely questionnaires. It’s one of the most widely used job analysis methods because it’s inexpensive to create and easy to distribute to numerous individuals at a faster rate. Questionnaires can have different question forms, such as open-ended questions, multiple choice, checklists or a mix of all of them.

Questionnaires used for job analysis collect data about all aspects that influence how a job is completed, including both internal and external factors. These are the most common areas that questionnaires focus on:

• Knowledge, skills, experience, and qualifications
• Duties performed daily
• Duties performed less frequently
• Equipment and materials used for duties
• Time spent on different job duties
• Physical and emotional input
• Level of job satisfaction
• Salary and compensation
• Work conditions
• Additional comments

Although questionnaires help begin the job analysis process, they are not enough to collect data that is both reliable and useful. They merely scratch the surface of job analysis. In fact, questionnaires do have several disadvantages, such as question misinterpretation, high non-response rates and inaccurate information given by participants. And inaccurate data is the complete opposite of what job analysts aim for.

Going back to the scientific example. Questionnaires create that larger sample size but do so in a way that is less authentic and, therefore, less impactful.

It’s important that job analysis in HRM yields reliable information. Therefore, it’s best to combine questionnaires with other job analysis methods. This will help job analysts retain and improve work conditions for current incumbents, as well as create a job description that will attract the right talent for future openings.

Job Analysis Method: Observation

The observation method enables job analysts to observe employees in their daily routines. The information collected through observation is extremely useful and reliable since it’s via first-hand knowledge. Observation is the only job analysis method that allows the job analyst or HR professional to directly obtain the data, whereas other job analysis methods collect data indirectly and in an orchestrated environment.

When using this particular method, a job analyst observes an employee and records what they do and do not do. This helps job analysts and HR professionals reach a more reliable conclusion. However, even the observation method comes with flaws. Some of the disadvantages of using the observation job analysis method include:

• Distortion of information if an employee is aware of the observation.
• Awareness may affect the work output during the observation.
• Not all job duties and reactions can be observed in the set time frame.
• Higher managerial and executive roles may be difficult to observe fully.

So, in other words, this process allows the analyst to create a wide-reaching sample pool while also understanding the factors at work when observing employees. It stands to reason that an employee will work harder when they know they are being analyzed - though it still gives the analyst a good framework to judge how well the role is being performed.

What Is the Purpose of Job Analysis in HRM?

Job analysis plays a significant part in the structure of HR departments. The job analysis processidentifies the need for talent and recognizes the type of talent needed to fill it. Apart from assisting the preparations of a succinct job description, the purpose of job analysis in HRM extends to other areas in the HR department. Here are some of the main purposes of job analysis in HRM:

• Job designing and redesigning – By frequently using these three job analysis methods, HR managers, and job analysts can work to improve job specifications, increase professional output and incite company growth.
• Human resource recruitment and selection – Job analysis defines the type of person that is needed for a particular position. Job analysis data highlights the level of education, qualifications, experience, and skills that need to be held by ideal candidates. Additionally, job analysis helps develop advertisements, salary levels, interview questions, selection tests, evaluation forms, and orientation materials for new recruits.
• Determining training needs – Job analysis processes help HR professional develop adequate training procedures. Job analysis can determine training content, assessment tests, training equipment and methods of training.
• Establishing a compensation management policy – A well-defined compensation management policy helps organizations retain, motivate and guide current talent, while also attracting new talent. Job analysis processes aid HR professionals to develop an effective compensation management policy that focuses on elements such as pay scale, bonus and incentive plans, work environment and restructuring positions as needed.
• Conducting performance reviews – Using data from the job analysis process is necessary for when HR professionals carry out performance reviews. Job analysis clearly defines the objectives of a job and sets scalable goals for employees that reflect their performance.

Job analysis in HRM takes a lot of planning, structuring and analysis. However, the job analysis process is vital to the growth and success of an organization. Without the proper use of job analysis methods, HR professionals would have little to no success in talent acquisition and filling in the gaps within an organization.

When choosing the best job analysis method for your organization, you must consider all the efforts, costs, time and risks that go into job analysis. You may even need to combine two or more job analysis methods for maximum efficiency. Plan your job analysis process with the help of experienced HR professionals and job analysts to ensure reliable and valid data.