MARKETING PRINCIPLES
Marketing is one of the crucial aspects that determine the growth and success of a business. Most aspects of an organization depend on successful marketing. The comprehensive marketing umbrella encompasses advertising, public relations, promotions and sales. According to Rossiter & Bellman (2005), without effective marketing, a business may offer the best products in the industry, but none of the potential customers would know about it. In this line, for effective marketing, organizations need to collect, record, and analyze data about customers and use it in establishing a strategy for meeting their needs. Effective marketing takes into consideration the four elements of the marking process, which are, price, place, product, and promotion (Cravens & Piercy, 2008).Elements of the marketing process:The primary purpose of marketing is creating a product that a particular group of people of customers want, putting it on sale at some place that those same people visit regularly, pricing it at a level which matches the value the customers feel they will get out of it; and doing all that at a time they want to buy (Jobber, & Ellis-Chadwick, 2012). I chose to use the four elements of the marketing process to analyze Pizza Express because the tool combines all the aspects of marketing. Most firms use the 4Ps of marketing to produce the responses they want in their target markets, hence; the tool consists of everything a firm can do to influence the demands for its products.
a. Place
Just like many other commercial organizations, Pizza Express highly regards all the four elements of the marketing process (Füller, & Matzler, 2008). For the element of place, despite operating in 14 different countries, the marketers always conducts a market research on the customers to determine the best location of the restaurants before deciding on where to place the a restaurant (Hollensen, 2015)s. This ensures that the restaurants are located in areas that are readily available to potential customers, and subsequently, the company records high revenues. For instance, Pizza Express has 13 restaurants that are strategically situated all around Hong Kong. Some of the company’s customers prefer their pizza to be delivered at their homes. In such cases, the company uses the direct distribution channel to get these products to the customers (Füller, & Matzler, 2008). This type of distribution channel proves successful for Pizza Express because of the extremely large market that is geographically dispersed (Füller, & Matzler, 2008).
b. Price
Under price, Pizza Express successfully uses the high/low pricing strategy in setting the retail price of its products. This strategy allows Pizza Express to charge a price that is above its competitors, but at the same time, promote frequent sales to lower the price below them. For instance, Pizza Express could set the retail price of “Bosco” at $20 which is higher than that of its competitors, and then use several sales promotions and coupons to lower the price below those of competitors (Hollensen, 2015).
c. Promotion
The primary target market of Pizza Express is the youth. The dominant …
