Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.
4 P’s of Marketing and the 5th P of Marketing
The four Ps of marketing are: product, price, place, and promotion. These are the 4 components that make up your marketing mix. There is one more P that ties all of these together and is your guide when making decisions within each of these areas: people. Your customer/target market is what should guide you when deciding what products to sell, how much to charge, where to place your products, and where to reach your customers.
Product
Application to your Spirit Box
Involve everyone in generating ideas:
Discuss as a Spirit Box Team. What products do each of you feel would do well? Why? List out products and the reasoning.
Involve customers in the process:
Create a customer survey to ask the students/teachers in your school to figure out what kind of products they want. Ask them if they would purchase products that you want to test out.
Involve customers in new ways:
Test products out. Purchase a lower quantity of products that might be riskier or you don’t know how they will do. Stock them in a coil in your machine and track and evaluate how it does.
Involve new customer groups:
Maybe your primary target market is students; try to branch outside of this. Many people enter your building, such as parents, teachers, and other faculty.
Involve suppliers: ask the Spirit Box staff about product ideas!
Price
Application to your Spirit Box
Internal Factors: are within the control of the business or can be altered by the business.
cost of goods, operating expenses, product mix
External Factors: occur outside of the business operation and cannot be controlled by the business. Supply and demand, government regulations, competition, natural and economic events. Example: your competitor might be another vending machine company. How does this impact your pricing or how you position your Spirit Box?
Price is very dependent on your target market. Is your school a lower or higher income school? Do higher priced items like headphones do well? Or do lower priced items like snacks do well? When pricing, revisit your target market and consider income, age, and interests.
Idea: Rio Rancho in New Mexico prices everything in their machine for a dollar regardless of what it is. They stock their machine with snacks. Some items may have a lower margin of revenue than others but they are making it easy for their customers to purchase. In 2019, Rio Rancho was the number one Spirit Box in revenue 7 months of the year.
Promotion
Application to your Spirit Box
A communication process to inform, persuade or remind customers about a product or service.
Ways to promote your Spirit Box:
School Announcements
Fliers around the building
Have the Spirit Box adviser email other teachers and ask they notify their classes of the Spirit Box (this is a good idea when launching)
Place
Application to your Spirit Box
Getting the right product to the right customer at the right time, at the right place, in the right quantity. The basic objective of all placement decisions or strategies is to make the product accessible for the consumer.
Consider the best location for your Spirit Box. Think about high traffic areas that will result in purchases.
Gymnasium
Cafeteria
How will you place products in your Spirit Box? How will pricing impact your product placement within the machine?
The 5th P: People
All of this work around product choices, placement, pricing strategy, and promotion does nothing without people (your customers/target market)
With the original 4 Ps in mind, tailor all of these to your target market of your Spirit Box.