The marketing mix is an essential and rather simple way to view the key elements to creating a winning campaign. When you market any type of product, business, or service the essentials of the marketing mix can help you succeed over and over again.
If you consider the marketing mix to be much like a recipe or like the basic ingredients that will lead to success, you might be more inclined to grasp the concept. When you mix up just about any given recipe you don't mix equal parts together. Cookies are made from a percentage of sugar, eggs, flour, and salt rather than equal parts of all ingredients.
When you create a marketing plan, the same can be said for your ingredients relating to the key elements of your success. You mix a percentage of the promotion with varying percentages of the product, place, and price in order to come up with the right balance to help determine your most successful marketing campaign.
In many ways, you can often cover one of the lesser exciting elements of your marketing campaign simply by adding a larger percentage of a more exciting ingredient. When you have the ability to load up the promotion, or the product, with enough public anticipation then the price becomes a secondary issue to the average consumer. After all, they already know that it is the must have product of the year. So what if it's a little more expensive than they want it to be?
The marketing mix is a simple but effective way to help monitor your success in putting together your campaigns. When you have a larger ingredient involving one element in your mix, keep track of your sales.
If you change course and add a larger percentage of a different ingredient, then you get to save that data as evidence of either a good move or a poor move. By keeping track of your percentages of your marketing campaign you can be sure that you will have it in black and white in order to continue to make better decisions.