We are all familiar with the marketing mix 4Ps: Product, Place, Promotion & Price, with Physical Evidence,   often added as an optional extra (some will add a couple more Ps).  I’ll happily discuss the marketing mix and how we can use these headings to shape our approach to the market and I’m not suggesting we should abandon them entirely.  But, and here’s the swipe, these are approaches from the supplier side.  What about the customer perspective?

Yep, radical as it may seem we need to view these elements from the customer perspective.  I suggest that for each P also consider what I call “the buying mix”.  Let’s apply some letters (this is not original, but can’t recall where I got it from during my studies all those years ago) and “A” will do nicely:

Product: Acceptability – how acceptable to your target customer(s) are the products or services: do they do meet the buyers’ requirement(s).
Place: Availability - where and how readily can your customer(s) get their hands on your products or services.
Promotion: Awareness - how and how easily can your customers find out about  your products and how to get them.
Price: Affordability – you may think it is a good and fair price but can your target customers actually afford it.

Just to make sure we haven’t missed any, let’s also take Physical Evidence…how about Aesthetics or Appearance…which offer a differentiation from whether a product does the job by adding the very important elements of fashion, smell or  cleanliness (quite important for a restaurant don’t you think!).

So, for a really customer focussed approach, think buying mix 4As and marketing mix 4Ps.

Well, I’ll try this analogy. I like to cook, and pulling together a good meal is more than just chucking a few ingredients in a pan.  The perfect meal needs the careful combinations of ingredients, flavours, pots and pans, cooker, timing and, of course, a cook to blend everything together for the optimum results: in short a carefully designed recipe, perhaps tweaked as you follow it, that brings all of these things together to give you the resulting foodie pleasures.

In the same way, a successful business is created and sustained by bringing together every aspect of your business.  I call this the business mix and find this to be a good representation:

By combining the operational and marketing mixes, we can begin to map the interactions between the various ingredients for our successful recipe.  Using this format as a starting point, and populating the business mix to fit your business, you can to collate all of the aspects of your business that impact its results: and that really will be all aspects of your business.

As product managers, or indeed general managers and executives, we need to work across the whole business mix to achieve the sustainable advantage we all want.

So, what should we then do with all of this newly tabulated insight? Well, I find that applying a ranking system to identify those most important, versus those less so, along with competence/capability rating helps.  And mapping a SWOT to the results really can focus the mind, and help you to focus the right resources, on the most important elements of the business mix for your business’ success.