Basic Frameworks of Marketing Strategy

The 4P are four elements the seller decides, Product, Price, Place and Promotion, and designing a plan by combining them is called the marketing mix (マーケティングミックス).

The four elements are not set one by one; they are aligned with each other so the combination suits the target customers. Place is sometimes glossed as "location," but what it really covers is choosing the route that carries goods to customers (the sales channel). Promotion methods include the push strategy (プッシュ戦略), which gets retailers and salespeople to recommend the product, and the pull strategy (プル戦略), which uses advertising and similar means to raise consumers' desire to buy so they come to the store themselves.

AnalogyIt is like a baker getting ready to open a shop and deciding all at once what bread to bake, what to charge, whether to sell from a shop by the station or from a van, and whether to hand out flyers or offer free samples.

How to rememberRead the P in Place as how goods get delivered rather than as a location, and it becomes clear that it is about distribution channels.

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The 4C framework restates the 4P from the buyer's point of view and consists of four elements: Customer Value, Cost (what the customer bears), Convenience (ease of obtaining) and Communication (two-way dialogue).

Product is reread as the value it offers the customer, price as the money and effort the customer spends, place as how easy the product is to obtain, and promotion as whether the company and the customer can communicate. The aim is to check the plan starting from what customers receive, not from what the company wants to sell.

AnalogyIt is the same bakery seen from the customer's side: checking, as a shopper, whether the bread tastes good, whether it is worth the price and the wait, whether it can be picked up on the way to work, and whether requests can be passed on to the shop.

How to rememberThe first C in 4C is Customer: remember that all four words are seen from the customer's side, and you will not confuse them with the seller-side 4P.

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Segment marketing (セグメントマーケティング) divides a market into groups of customers who share common traits, called segments (セグメント), and directs its efforts only at the segments it targets.

Dividing the market is called segmentation (セグメンテーション) and choosing which segments to aim at is called targeting (ターゲティング); together these two steps settle the target customer group. Besides attributes such as region of residence or income, buying attitudes such as how early someone buys a new product can also serve as a dividing axis. Compared with mass marketing (マスマーケティング), which applies the same plan to the whole market, segment marketing makes it easier to put a limited budget into the groups most likely to respond.

AnalogyIt is like a bookstore sorting its shoppers into groups such as exam candidates, parents raising young children and fishing hobbyists, then picking the books for the front tables to suit the groups that visit most.

How to rememberA segment is a piece cut from a whole: picture pulling a mandarin orange apart section by section, the way a market is split up.

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Positioning (ポジショニング) is the step of setting, for the target customers, the key points of differentiation (差別化) between one's own product and competing ones, and deciding where it stands in customers' minds.

It comes after segmentation and targeting have fixed the target group, and it sorts out differences from competitors along axes customers care about, such as affordability or the range of features. Once the axes that show the difference are set, it becomes easier to decide how to combine the 4P to match.

AnalogyPicture several lunch-box shops on the same street: one promotes big portions at low prices, another promotes healthy, vegetable-centered meals, so each gives customers a different reason to remember it.

How to rememberPosition means place: imagine a map in the customer's head and push your own pin into a spot away from the competitors' pins.

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The Ansoff growth matrix (アンゾフの成長マトリクス) splits products and markets into existing and new, combines them, and sorts a company's growth directions into four strategies.

Market penetration (市場浸透) means selling more of the current products in the current markets; perks that encourage replacement purchases to raise how often existing customers buy are one example. Changing only the product is new product development (新製品開発), changing only the market is market development (市場開拓), and changing both is diversification (多角化); diversification, where existing strengths are hardest to use, is generally seen as the riskiest.

AnalogyIt is like a ramen shop weighing how to grow and laying out four options in a grid: getting regulars to come more often, launching a new flavor, opening in the next prefecture, or starting a completely different kind of business.

How to rememberEach strategy name says what is new: a new product means new product development, a new market means market development, both means diversification, and neither means market penetration.

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The product life cycle (プロダクトライフサイクル) views how a product's sales change from launch until it leaves the market in four stages: introduction (導入期), growth (成長期), maturity (成熟期) and decline (衰退期).

Because sales, profit and the number of competitors change from stage to stage, the right measures differ even for the same product. For example, a period focused on advertising to build awareness and a period focused on cutting costs to secure profit call for different combinations of the 4P.

AnalogyCompared with a human life, the stages are like being born and getting known, growing fast, settling into adulthood and eventually stepping back from the front line.

How to rememberTell growth from maturity by the words themselves: growth is still getting bigger, while maturity is fully grown, like ripe fruit.

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