The Elements Of The Marketing Mix: Price, Product,

In June 2007 Apple put the first iPhone on sale in the United States at 599 dollars for the larger model. Ten weeks later it cut the price to 399 dollars, and after complaints from the people who had queued on the first day it offered them a 100 dollar store credit. Nothing had gone wrong. The company had deliberately charged the people who wanted it most, first, at the price they were willing to pay, and then dropped to the price that would reach everybody else. The awkward part was that both groups could read the news.

This is the largest topic in the marketing section and it carries fourteen specification statements. You will work through all four elements of the mix: the five pricing methods and what decides which one fits, how products are developed and differentiated and how they age through the product life cycle, the promotional methods and what governs the choice between them, and the channels through which a product reaches a customer, including e-commerce. The last idea is the one that turns a list into an answer: the four elements have to agree with each other, and a case study that describes one of them changing is really telling you that the other three are now wrong.