Ah yes, the Marketing Mix. Those classic “Four P’s” they hammer in to you when you walk in to every Marketing Fundamentals class taught in the world:

PRODUCT + PRICE + PROMOTION + PLACE

We all know them, we all love them, but sometimes they slip out of our consciousness from time to time. Even the most seasoned marketing pros have moments where they miss the mark on at least one of them. It just happens.

I’ve thought a lot about this lately, and came up with a fun little 5-minute exercise that Marketers of all skill levels can benefit from in order to gain a little more perspective on why the 4 P’s are so essential to keep in mind.

Here’s the instructions for this simple exercise:

1 – Create a simple two-column table with 8 rows in each.

2 – Label the left column “Low-cost Frequent Purchase” and the right column “High-cost One-Time Purchase”

3 – Label the rows, from top to bottom: Brand, Product, Price, Promotion, Place, #1 Reason I Bought, Alternate Brand, #1 Reason I Didn’t Buy

4 – Complete the chart as follows, starting with the left column:

• Choose a low-cost item that you buy regularly (Coffee, toothpaste, razor blades, etc)
• List the Brand, Product, and Price you paid in the first three boxes
• List the most recent Promotional piece for that product you saw (commercial, ad, website, etc), and whether you believe it influenced your choice
• List the Place you made your purchase (Walmart, Starbucks, Online, etc)
• List the #1 Reason you bought that particular product (price, quality, taste, etc)
• List a competing brand that would be your #1 choice as an alternate if you couldn’t buy your preferred item
• List the #1 reason you did not choose that brand

5 – Repeat those actions for the right column, but with an expensive product you don’t buy often. (Car, Vacation, TV, computer, etc)

***BE SURE YOUR CHART IS COMPLETE BEFORE READING ANY FURTHER, OR YOU MAY SKEW THE RESULTS***

Now that you’ve completed your chart, take a look at the boxes containing the reasons you bought your preferred brands, and compare them to the reasons you didn’t buy the alternate brands. One would assume that they would correlate. Do they?

If you say you bought Crest toothpaste because you like the taste, one would assume you didn’t buy Colgate because you didn’t like the taste. Often though, the reasons we buy are decidedly different than the reasons we don’t buy. Maybe they don’t like the cap design on the Colgate tube, or perhaps it was something else. As another example, someone may buy Tim Hortons because they like the taste of the coffee, but they won’t buy Coffee Time because they don’t like their stores. Which is the real influencing factor for that coffee buyer? Is it taste, or store design? Or a combination of both?

When you get in to the high-cost column, the discrepancy could be even more pronounced, or it could be non-existent. When looking at cars for example, there are many consumers who buy strictly on price. Still others may buy on price, but eliminate options based on quality or service experiences.

What this simple exercise does is help illustrate the real difficulty in pinpointing the underlying motivation behind consumer behaviour, and how it varies based on where the consumer is in the buying cycle, the cost of the item, the amount of knowledge they have on the product, and more. It’s not always clear to the customer what the real value inherent in a particular brand or product is, and it’s especially unclear when looking through the eyes of individual consumers. It will vary from person to person, sometimes slightly and sometimes drastically.

Once you’ve done this experiment yourself, have a friend who’s not involved in the field Marketing do it for you, too. Their answers are often even more fascinating than your own, and can raise more questions about the alignment between a particular brand message, and the actual brand experience.

Hope you had fun with this little exercise! Let’s hear about your thoughts on this in the comments below!