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Maximize Your Marketing Mix

Reprinted from News-To-Use, Vol.6, No.2.
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To grow up big and strong- and avoid premature death- you need a balanced diet of grains, fruit, vegetables, dairy products and protein.

Similarly, to keep a company healthy- and profitable- you need a balanced diet of Marketing Mix.

Among the ingredients:

• Product. Especially a product which- as a client of ours is fond of saying- is "uniquely different and pleasingly better" than anything else in your market. If you don't have that much- desired "unique selling proposition", bulk up on R&D before you do anything else.

• R&D. Many companies ride one product into the ground and then start looking for another, but it's a practice kind of like a daily diet of Coke and Twinkies for breakfast. Make sure you're getting plenty of R&D so you'll have new and improved product to take to market.

• Distribution. If a product isn't easy for a customer to buy, it's not going to be easy for you to sell. Double-check your distribution system.

• Pricing. Price if high enough to make a profit and low enough to be value to your prospects. If you can't, maybe it's time for your manufacturing costs to go on a diet.

• Sales. This is often confused with marketing; here's how to tell the difference: sales is about salespeople selling the brand right now, marketing is about building equity in the long-term perception of it held by the customers and prospects. You can do both at once, but you don't want to do one to the exclusion of the other.

Finally, marketing is accomplished in no small measure by...
• Marketing Communications. This is everything you do to tell your message to your customers and prospects: advertising, public relations, trade shows, brochures, tech sheets, direct mailers, skywriting, matchbooks, door-hangers - everything. Marketing communications happens to be our particular expertise, and we think it's critically important to successful marketing. But we're smart enough to know that failing to pay attention to any part of the Marketing Mix can cause a company to sicken and die a horrible death. Our advice: get plenty of rest and exercise, and take a good, hard look at your Marketing Mix today.

Ripley-Woodbury Marketing Communications
Marketing Strategy | Advertising | Public Relations | Web Development
1124 Main Street, Ste. B, Irvine, CA 92614
ph: (949) 251-0704  |  fax :(949) 251-0806  |  www.rwmarketing.com
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