The 7 P’s of Marketing: Product, Price, Promotion, Place, Physical evidence, People & Process

If you own a service business, the 7p’s are quite literally the blueprint for marketing success. Were you to sit down and work with the 7P framework you would be well on your way towards business success.

The 4 P’s are incredibly simple and wonderfully powerful. If you have not come across them before, you may ask, what are they and how do they work?

Product:

A Product, Service or Idea is something that fulfills the needs & wants of the customers.

Questions to ask yourself under the heading of Product (service) are as follows:

1. What benefits do you offer your customers?

2. Why should they pick your product or service?

3. What do you offer that is different to your competition? (differentiation)

4. Who are your customers?

5. Where do they hang out? (eg. what social media platforms do they use?)

Price:
The price you charge for any product or service, will serve two things. Firstly, it will determine the perceived quality of the product or service in the mind of the consumer (bear in mind, that the quality of your branding and packaging will help customers agree or disagree on your pricing strategy) and secondly it will decide your profit margins! If you price too low, you will severely impact your bottom line, and if you price too high, you run the risk of selling very little.

As such this is a delicate balance, that each individual business owner has to choose for everything that they sell. With this in mind, each entrepreneur needs to be VERY familiar with what benefits they are offering their customers with their product or service. If you refer to the questions under product, it is an excellent guide towards deciding on a specific price for anything you are selling.

Promotion:
This is where the action work kicks in, where you have to create a marketing strategy and execute it, to help sell as many products as you can to the marketplace.
The product and the pricing of your product, will help you to decide what promotion strategy to use. Bear in mind, every industry is different and every product or service is different. There is no one strategy that fits every business! if only it were so easy…
I see some advisers, offering the three / five/ ten steps or such like to guaranteed marketing success. If you see these run! They may act as a template but in all honesty will not work for EVERY product or service. There are simply too many variables.

Promotional Strategies to consider are:
1. A strong PR campaign – designed to let everyone know you and your product exists!
2. Decide at least two social media platforms on which to market your product (make sure your target market actually do hang out on this platform)
3. Website promotion
4. Retargeting campaign
5. Google ads
6. Facebook ads
7. In store promotion – product taste or test if relevant
8. webinars – online promotion
9. Blogs
10. JV Launch

These are just some of the promotional strategies you could use. Everything is determined by the product (service) that you are selling.

Place:
This refers to ‘where’ you are selling your product (service). If you own a physical shop, a gym or such like. This is the physical location or place that you are selling from. On the other hand you may be an online seller and as such your website is your ‘place’ Other aspects of place to consider is how are you going to distribute your product (service)

Physical Evidence:

A service is intangible by its very nature, however there is still an exchange process going on and by using a service there is typically physical evidence of that transaction. For example a trip to the dentist can result in a tooth extraction, a business coach may get you to write out a business plan and so on. In short what transformation occurred as a result of using a particular service?

People:

This refers to the employees of the service business and makes reference to how well or how poorly the employees deliver the service. In this aspect if you can rate your employees, use mystery shoppers and basically have key checks in place to monitor staff performance, so that you can ensure they deliver a supreme service, every time.

Process:

The process refers to the systems used within a service business to make the business more efficient and to deliver a higher quality of service. Examples of this is that there are always staff to answer queries on the phone, that if someone submits an email inquiry there will be a system in place to pick up that query and deal with it as quickly as possible. The process is where a business can easily earn extra brownie points from customers, simply by being organised and by having good processes in place.

In order to use the 4P or the 7P framework I would recommend doing each section for your own business. Simply by mapping out the 4P’s and 7P’s it will give you a blueprint that will help you make key marketing and business decisions that will set you up for business success.

If you have any queries or would like to post a comment, please do so below.

Many Thanks for reading my blog,

Emma D.x