Marketing mix is a composite of product, place, price, and promotion, also referred to as ôthe four PÆs.ö Each of these elements is an important factor in a companyÆs marketing strategy. ôProductö is the companyÆs products, with all of the attributes that make them uniqueùdesign, packaging, functionality, and virtually everything pertaining to how a product looks and what it does. The companyÆs brand name is included in the product category and can become synonymous with the product, as in the case of Coca-Cola. ôPlaceö is where the product can be found, such as in physical stores and online in virtual stores; it includes everything connected with getting the product from the place to the customer, as well, such as warehousing, inventory management, transport, and distribution. ôPriceö includes all price-related factors, such as both the retail and wholesale pricing, coupons associated with the sale of the product, volume discounts, and any other costs which must be factored into the price, like the cost of fuel for transportation. ôPromotionö is everything related to promoting the productùpromotional strategy, publicity, advertising, modes of selling (personal selling, sales force, Internet selling, etc.), and the restrictions on the promotional strategyùbudget, legal constraints, and corporate directives (ôThe Marketing Mixö).
Toys ôRö Us is a for-profit organization that has implemented a winning marketing mix within its marketing strategy. It uses marketing mix modeling (MMM) systems to ôcombine predictive models with real-time reports to forecast the effectiveness of marketing activitiesö (Caggiano 2005). This cuts down the lag time that usually afflicts traditional methods of looking at past data and allows Toys ôRö Us to fine-tune its efforts on a more timely basis, even allowing marketers to make changes on the fly (Caggiano 2005). If the company wants to shift part of their expenditures fro...