The Marketing Mix

Rhiannon Fleming

Foundations of Marketing Assessment

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What is the Marketing Mix?

"A company needs to consider the Marketing Mix in order to meet their consumers' needs effectively" - BBC Bitesize, Business Studies.

The Marketing Mix is the most tactical part of marketing, which includes various different factors usually referred to as "P's". Generally, the Marketing Mix consists of the 4 P's:

• Product: The goods and/or services that an organisation offers
• Price: How much customers pay
• Place: Where the product/service is made available for customers
• Promotion: The way customers are informed about the product

However, the Marketing Mix can be further expanded by adding features such as People, Physical Evidence and Process. Ultimately making the Marketing Mix a concept of 7 P's.

• People: The people who deliver the product or service
• Physical Evidence: How an organisation product/service is perceived
• Process: How the service is delivered.

For every business establishment, the 7 P's are integrated and can be broken down to be looked at thoroughly. Throughout this blog, I will look at numerous Cosmetic Companies and evaluate how they use each stage of the Marketing Mix, highlighting how they do it and how successful it is for them.

Place

The Economic Times website explains the definition of Place within the Marketing Mix well, stating that it "refers to the channel, or the route, through which goods move from the source to the final user. Place could be the intermediaries, distributors, wholesalers and retailers.".

For all makeup brands, in store and online are options for purchasing. High end makeup brands such as MAC have numerous stores located worldwide, MAC particularly have a large number of stores in the UK alone.  However, for majority of high end makeup brands in the United Kingdom, online is the best way to purchase products - this is because makeup brands such as Urban Decay, Too Faced, Estee Lauder, Chanel and so on, are only sold in big department stores such as The House of Fraser, Debenhams, John Lewis  and Selfridges, rather than having a store themselves. This means the variety of products are limited, with only a selected amount on sale.

However, Digital Marketing (known as e-marketing) is progressing rapidly for all high end makeup brands. This is because they allow customers to purchase products on different sites as well as their own, despite having very well developed online stores. This gives customers the option to purchase from sites such as John Lewis or The House of Fraser rather than the actual "Too Faced" website for example. This is preferred for a number of people as they are able to purchase from a well known site that they may use regularly for a number of different things, also allowing them

to do it at the comfort of their own home - any time, any place. For people living the United Kingdom, getting our hands on popular makeup brands can be tricky, so recently with the development of a site called "BeatyBay", the buying of American makeup has become easier. This site offers all makeup brands which aren't available to buy in UK stores, this recent development has exploded and has worked well in the promotion and selling of certain brands like Anastasia Beverly Hills, Too Faced, Morphe and many more.

In regards to makeup brands such as Maybelline, Rimmel and so on, the name developed for these brands are known as "High Street" this is because you would typically buy these products in our local "drugstore". However, both in store and online purchasing is available, but these brands have never had their own stores and products are sold in shops known as Boots and Superdrug (these two being the leading "drugstores" in the UK).

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