Why read this? : We explore an example marketing mix for a pizza delivery business. Grab a slice of all 7Ps of marketing in action. Read this to spark ideas for your own marketing mix.
The marketing mix covers the main activities marketers looks after.
As per our marketing plan guide, it’s also known as the 4Ps of marketing. Product, price, place and promotion. This becomes 7Ps for service businesses, which also have to plan around people, process and physical location.
There’s been many attempts to update, edit or replace it (including our own light-hearted attempt).
But it’s like the Swiss Army knife of marketing planning. A practical tool with many uses, good at what it does, and built to last. You definitely want it in your marketing toolkit.
The best way to learn any tool is to use it. So this week, we use it on the pizza delivery business case study from our customer journey article. Building an example marketing mix for that business will help show how you move from thinking about the marketing mix to actually using it.
What the marketing mix Ps cover
To start, let’s do a quick overview of what those marketing mix Ps cover :-
- Product – the physical product or service experience the customer pays for. This delivers the core benefit and covers tangible factors like the product’s ingredients and materials, quality, features, and style. It also covers broader areas like the branding, warranties and support services.
- Price – how much the customer pays. This includes the regular price, price discounts and also any loyalty offers.
- Promotion – the communication activities which draw attention to the brand and persuade customers to buy.
- Place – where the product is sold. e.g. from your own premises, via a retailer, or via e-Commerce.
- People – the people involved in delivering the customer experience.
- Process – the systems used and actions completed in delivering the experience.
- Physical location – where the service is delivered. Related to place, but more specific to where the experience happens than where the sale takes place.
Case Study Intro : Sydney Pineapple Pizza Company
Our case study company is the (fictitious) Sydney Pineapple Pizza Company, based at Bondi Beach.
It’s been open a few weeks. We’ve already done some initial marketing planning. For example, we’ve identified our target audience and scoped the customer journey.
Now, we’re thinking about how to grow in the year ahead. That means writing a marketing plan.
As the business is still new, the growth focus will be on market penetration. (see our innovation guide and Ansoff Matrix article for more on this).
We want to grow share in the current suburb we deliver to (existing markets) and grow the pizza side of our business (existing products).
However, our targeting work has suggested an opportunity to expand delivery coverage to a nearby suburb (market development). This should also go into our example marketing mix.
Let’s start with the product, i.e. what we’re selling.
Product
Our target audience’s shared need is a love of pineapple on their pizza. That’s part of our unique niche positioning, so the product plan has to deliver the best possible pineapple-topped pizzas.
Extra toppings
Most people think Hawaiian pizza when you mention pineapple, and let’s say we already offer that as one of our core pizzas. But there’s many other toppings which also work with pineapple such as pepperoni, BBQ chicken and Jalapeño.
So the first part of our product plan in this example marketing mix is testing out different toppings with customers. For example, we get some of them in for a taste test. And we run a special offer for a week to see if there’s demand. We’d set a goal to identify the top 3 most appealing extra toppings (say by 8 weeks into the plan), and have those added to the menu for the rest of the year.
XXL pizza offer
We also decide to look at size options. We currently only offer medium, large and extra large. But all our competitors also offer extra extra large sizes. That puts us at a disadvantage, so the second part of our product plan is to add an XXL option.
For both of these new product activities, we’d set a sales target and allocate budget to pay for the set-up and testing.
Future product areas to consider
Clearly, product can also cover many other areas.
For example, offering different types of pizza base, different shapes of pizza and different types of pineapple topping. We could go even more niche with offers like plant-based options or low-fat pizzas.
With some creative thinking, we could play around with giving the different pizza types more memorable names. Or update the packaging to make sure the pizza arrives perfectly cooked.
These will all be worth testing at some point. But as we’re still new and small, we can’t do everything. We make choices. In most marketing plans, the product area focuses on the 2-3 activities with the biggest impact. Prioritising is key. So, for the purposes of this example marketing mix, we’ll prioritise the new toppings, and the XXL size.
Price
Our pricing approach is driven by our competitive strategy which is niche focussed. We know we’ve an audience ready to pay a premium for our high quality pineapple pizza offering.
Premium price position
To support that premium image, we review competitor prices and put our prices at a higher price point. Say about 20% higher.
Our competitors’ average price is $18 per pizza. So, we make our regular pizza price $19.99. (using charm pricing to keep it below $20). This means we pull in customers who truly value our pineapple-ness, and helps with the profitability levels in our profit and loss.
Delivery charge
We also look at the delivery charge as this is part of the customer’s overall order cost.
First, we review competitor delivery costs to get a feel for what customers currently pay. We also look at how they deliver to see if they offer any extra service with the delivery e.g. guaranteed delivery times, or discounts for ordering a certain amount.
Unless we have some sort of competitive advantage in delivering pizzas (which we don’t), the best plan here is to match the best competitor offer. To nullify it as a factor in the customer’s choice.
So here, the pricing part of our example marketing mix would also define the delivery charge, let’s say $5. And it’d specify the discount a customer gets for larger orders e.g. free delivery or 10% off, on orders over $50.
Future price areas to consider
We’d obviously track the impact of these pricing decisions in our profit and loss and business dashboard.
Those might show other opportunities or challenges where price could play a role. For example, maybe there’s low demand at the start of the week. So, we could test running a price discount on Mondays and Tuesday as a sales promotion.
Another option to explore would be a price-driven loyalty discount. We’d use our CRM system to track a customer’s order history, and offer a discount on say, every 5th pizza order.
Promotion
There’s obviously many different ways to promote our business. Finding the best way is a trial and error process. However, based on our initial customer journey work, we know online is a key area with customers.
Search and display advertising
So for this part of our example marketing mix, we prioritise paid search and display advertising on food delivery platforms like Uber Eats.
The marketing plan would spell out how much we’d spend, the goals for each activity and how we’d measure the results.
Leaflet drops
We also know competitors are active online too.
So, we’d look at having some extra presence in other, non-digital channels to help us stand out. For example, something as simple as a regular leaflet drop of our pizza menu in areas we deliver to.
Not all promotional work has to be clever or unusual. Pizza shops do these leaflet drops because they know it gives them visibility inside the customer’s home. (even if it’s stuffed in a drawer in the kitchen).
Future promotion areas to consider
You know what you’re getting with these paid advertising approaches. You get a targeted audience of customers, and your brand name and message in front of them a guaranteed number of times. If it doesn’t work, you look for alternatives or do them differently. e.g choosing different search keywords, or advertising on a different food delivery service.
Another promotion option we’d consider in future would be PR. For example, we could connect with locally based lifestyle magazines and run some sort of feature, competition or event. This is usually cheaper than paid advertising, though has less guaranteed coverage. We could also approach relevant influencers who could share their experience of ordering / eating our pizzas.
We’d look at the reach and relevance of these extra channels to see how they’d amplify the rest of our promotional activities.
Place
To keep this example marketing mix simple, we’re focussing on the delivery side of the business when it comes to place.
However, let’s say we also offer takeaway where the customer can come in and collect their pizza. Plus, a small seating area if they want to sit-in and eat.
We’ll come back to this when we look at the physical location part of the marketing mix.
Test delivery to a new suburb
Instead place here covers where the customer “gets” the pizza, i.e. how and where it’s delivered.
In this case, our previous market attractiveness work identified a neighbouring suburb which looks attractive for deliveries. We’d also looked at that suburb when doing some Six Hats creative thinking to decide where to base ourselves. So, we’d include a plan to test offering delivery to that suburb in this part of our example marketing mix.
Refining the online experience
The other “place” where customers experience our pizza shop brand is online. We’ve already covered the promotion elements, so the key here would be to test and refine our website experience.
These cover the key journey steps of “persuade me” and “make it easy to buy”. That would include improving the copywriting and photography on the site, for example. Plus, testing out different call to action buttons, and offering better payment and delivery options.
Which brings us onto the more service led elements of this example marketing mix.
People
There’s 3 main areas where customers interact with the people in our business :-
- delivery drivers.
- front of house staff who handle takeaway and / or phone orders.
- team who handle customer service issues.
Let’s assume before we launched the business, we trained the team in how to deliver great customer service. They know how to deal with customers in a friendly, helpful and professional way.
However, with all these new activities in our example marketing mix, we need to plan how we’ll get our team to support and deliver these.
For example, we’ll need to train the team in how to upsell to help drive sales of our large order discount offer. When do they need to make the offer? What words should they use? How should they answer questions about it? We need a training plan so the team know how to respond to these types of questions. The same would apply to other new activities like the new XXL size and delivery to the new suburb.
We also need to track what customers think about our service. So, we’d set up a customer feedback survey to check customers are happy with their experience. Part of our people plan in this example marketing mix then would be regularly reviewing that to look for opportunities and issues.
Process
Some process improvements would already have come out from changes in other parts of the marketing mix.
For example, how we make the XXL pizzas as part of product development. How we make the website easier to use as part of our place plans. And so on.
For the purposes of this example marketing mix, we’ll focus on the 2 activities which we believe will have the biggest impact on sales.
We know that the more clicks it takes to buy, the more likely the customer will drop out. Too many friction points in the ordering process impacts sales. And that isn’t good for our profit and loss. So, we’d make a process goal in the plan to reduce the number of clicks to buy on the website by, say 30%.
Delivery is clearly also a big part of the pizza delivery process. The clue’s in the name. Delivering pizzas more efficiently makes the overall experience better and keeps customers happier. So, we’d add a delivery process goal of reducing the delivery time in this example marketing mix. That could mean having more drivers at peak demand times, or a better notification system for when an order is ready for delivery.
Physical Location
Finally, there’s the physical location. In this case, it’s going to be very similar to what we’ve already covered in place.
The main difference will be the takeaway / sit-in experience. To see if there’s demand for it, we plan to add more tables to increase the eating-in capacity.
Plus of course, our website acts as a “virtual” physical location for us. So, we plan to add more payment options such as AMEX and Paypal.
Conclusion - Grab a pizza this example marketing mix
There’s a well-known quote from Eisenhower that plans are worthless, but planning is everything.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t write plans. But, realise that by the time you’ve written and acted on them, circumstances may have changed.
It’s the process of doing the planning which makes you prepared for these changes.
The marketing mix we’ve put together here is a good example of that. It’s based on what we think should have the biggest impact on this pizza business.
But you’ll have noticed, we’ve also indicated extra or contingency activities to hold in reserve.
This helps with one of the big challenges in marketing planning. Writing the plan can be so exhausting and time-consuming, that you become over-committed to it. (a form of bias).
What we’ve shown in this example, is the marketing mix gives you a good framework to structure your thinking. To make sure you’re covering the key actions you need to improve the customer experience and grow your business. It makes sure you haven’t missed anything important.
But you also need to give yourself some space to change things around if not everything works. Being flexible helps make sure you focus on what gives you the biggest bang for your marketing buck.
Check out our marketing plan guide and our 4Ps of marketing article for more on this. Or get in touch if this article has made you hungry to learn more about using the marketing mix.
Photo credits
Hawaiian Pizza : Photo by bckfwd on Unsplash
Back : Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash
Visa card and laptop : Photo by Anastasiia Ostapovych on Unsplash
Google Tablet : Photo by PhotoMIX Ltd. from Pexels
Food delivery cyclist : Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
Customer service headset near laptop : Photo by Petr Macháček on Unsplash
Online shopping with phone and credit card : Photo by PhotoMIX Company from Pexels
Entry : Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
