The good old 12-point marketing checklist

According to my mentor, South Africa's most legendary marketer, Colin Adcock, (former MD of Lindsay Smithers and CEO of Toyota SA), the marketing mix is nothing more than a checklist to ensure that all one's ducks are in a marketing row.

Just a checklist

Rather like the checklist a jumbo jet pilot uses before he takes off. Making sure each element on the list is working with and not in conflict with any other elements.

Not an absolutely essential requirement for successful marketing but a great safeguard. Just as that jumbo jet pilot would probably get from Johannesburg to London quite safely time after time without bothering with his checklist, there will almost certainly come a time when he runs into trouble.

Applied in isolation

One of the biggest problems with marketing in South Africa and in particular elements such as advertising and PR is that they are often conducted in isolation and without cross checking on elements with which they might be in conflict. A simple example is the number of times a company launches an ad campaign without distribution having been finalised and ending up in a situation where consumers go into the store to buy the product they saw advertised, only to find it is not in stock yet. Or working out pricing without including cost of sales.

A huge indictment on the marketing industry is a search for "marketing mix" in Google. You will get 1.6 million results - all of them probably different.

Four Ps

In the US, the marketing mix is generally understood to be the far too simplistic "Four Ps" (Price, Place, Product and Promotion).

In the UK, they have 15 fairly complicated elements to the marketing mix, but the one that makes most sense is Colin Adcock's 12 point version:

• Product
  
• Research
  
• Pricing
  
• Branding
  
• Packaging
  
• Merchandising
  
• Distribution
  
• Selling
  
• Sales promotion
  
• Advertising
  
• Public relations
  
• Promotion

Quite simply, Adcock, argued, if one makes sure that each of these elements does not have anything in them that conflicts with any of the 11 others, the risk of marketing failure is reduced to very little.

Change in emphasis

Obviously though, depending on your product or service, some aspects of the mix change in emphasis and definition.

Interestingly enough, on all the talks and lectures I give on marketing, those audiences that seem to grasp the importance and practicality of the marketing mix are accountants.

Which makes sense. Because marketing is not magic or simply big ideas, but a process of risk elimination. Having said that, however, few accountants like to accept that pricing is a function of marketing and not of accounting.