Have you ever heard of the 4 ?P's? of marketing? If you have not had a basic business course or attended training on marketing and business, this concept may not be something you are using when planning your own annual marketing plan and strategies. This article is going to review the 4 ?P's? briefly and use promotional pens as the example for clarification and is really well worth a read to any marketing or advertising professional.

Before identifying the 4 ?P's?, it is important that you know there are many different kinds of marketing and promotional models floating around. The purpose of all these models, though, is the same ? leveraging the dollars that you spend on marketing to get the greatest outcome from those dollars. This leveraging is done by strategically balancing the price, product, promotion and place so that you are able to grab your target market, get their attention and ultimately increase the value and profit of your business.

The principle of the 4 ?P's? of marketing is that for a marketing to be successful each one of the ?P's? must be thoroughly considered as an individual variable in your marketing plan. in addition, it is important that the planning process not favor one ?P? over another ?P?. During the planning process each variable or ?P? must be considered equally.

Take promotional pens as an example. It is important to consider your budget and price (P) when selecting promotional pens. This is obvious, of course. But it would be mindless to only consider the price (P) of the promotional pens and not take into account that particular product (P) and its level of quality and appeal to your market audience. Quality is important and cheaper (price) is not always quality (product).

Thinking about and planning for the third ?P?, place, is also important to consider along with price and product. Are you going to be distributing your promotional pens at your place of business, at a trade show, at a conference or seminar etc.? You may actually want to distribute your promotional pens in all of these or one or more of these. Making this decision before selecting your product will save you a lot of grief when you realize the product you selected is not appropriate for the venue where it is being distributed.

The final ?P? to consider is promotion or how are you going to set up a planned promotional event and/or how are you going to serendipitously, in a manner of speaking, disseminate or distribute your promotional printed pens. Planning this out in advance helps in a number of ways including: knowing the deadline to have the pens available for your specific promotion activities and determining the different kinds and varieties of promotional pens you will purchase to sit with each type of promotional activity.

When you operationalize a ?P's marketing plan, it will look like this ? P+P+P+P = increased visibility and profit. Another way to look at this is: Price + Product + Place + Promotion = increased visibility and profit.