When sweet Molly Malone walks through the streets of Dublin in that lilting Irish ballad, it’s clear she knows a thing or two about marketing.
She does her promoting where her customers are, while her unique discriminator is her cockles and mussels are fresh from the sea. Her wheelbarrow adds a touch of authenticity; if you want the real thing come to me.
I don’t suppose Molly will have to do any hard selling. I can imagine the lads queueing up to buy from a fishmonger I don’t doubt was one of the loveliest girls around.
What a marketing package! Notice how she focuses on her customers’ needs, not her own. If we could be that effective we could call ourselves master marketers! And we could when we touch the right bases in the marketing game.
Molly Malone Statue in the Streets of Dublin (Credit Fan of Birdland BY CC 2.0)
The Right Bases in the Marketing Game – The Marketing Mix
Marketing continued to be an intuitive affair until marketing professor E Jerome McCarthy used a marketing mix to explain his trade to less spontaneous students. His four criteria (the original 4P’s) were:
- The intrinsic value of the product to the customer
- The price, which should have a bearing to the inherent value
- The ‘place’ where the target encounters the marketing message
- The promotion itself, namely the message to the potential customer
The Current 6 P’s in Our Marketing Mix
E Jerome McCarthy was well received, although many in the marketing industry believed two things were lacking. These two elements were the people in the marketing effort, and the process the marketing effort follows. Moreover, they wanted to de-emphasize the product itself perhaps because they felt it was not always present in the marketing moment.
Therefore the current marketing mix on which we base our series of twelve articles is as follows:
- The price of the product pitched to sell in the potential market
- The promotion being the process to make that market want to purchase
- The ‘place’ where the target finds the message (advertisement, shop etc.)
- The people chosen to deliver the message if marketing person-to-person
- The process, namely the method the marketing team follows
- Any physical evidence in the marketing environment influencing a decision
Let’s Close Out by Relating This to Molly
We imagine the price would be keen because the shellfish were fresh from the ocean, and marketing costs were minimal. Her promotion was excellent because Molly used authentic props. Thirdly, she was in the same space as her target market on their way home.
Moreover, we could not want for a more authentic person to deliver the message. Molly’s process of delivering her seafood freshly caught was brilliant. Finally the physical evidence of the barrow and the baskets was truly top drawer!
Molly did not seem to feel the need to dish out free samples. We’ll be discussing the power of exchange theory in the next post and why it works. While you wait, why not have fun analysing the marketing messages you encounter in your daily life, in terms of those 6P’s we shared.
