4P’s Retail Marketing Strategy in Philippine setting

By Bryan Racines

Retail products are mostly caters the need and wants of the consumers this includes daily needs and other products and commodities. Product strategy is the decision to make the products available in one or multiple formats is a critical issue in the total marketing mix of satisfying customers. Creating a good brand will ensure the success of the product as well as achieving the retailers’ objectives and desired result.

The pricing schemes of many retail outlets are varied from local and multinational retailers, for types of products and outlets categories. Retailers decides to change their own product price upwards and downwards and deciding how much and for how long. New products are initially set a higher prices to skim maximum revenue from the segments who are willing to pay the higher price. When the new product become established or widely accepted already, retailers lower the price to attract the next price sensitive customers. A very good example is when retailer is on sale. The products are discounted from 10% up to 70%. On this strategy the market is attracted to go on that retail outlet because of the discounted price of the product. SM Malls practices this strategy on a timely basis. Most of the time SM have a 3 day sale on holidays especially on Christmas wherein people has money coming from their Christmas bonuses. Retailers initiates to maintain old price for a while to gain a strong foothold of market. Multi-branding pricing strategy to different target markets and different positioning approaches. After a retailer has selected its target market and positioning, then its pricing strategy together with other marketing mix elements becomes a crucial factor for success in achieving desired results. A pricing strategy to a large extent is determined by prior decisions on market positioning. Therefore, the more clearly a company can identify its objectives, the easier it is to set the price.

Marketing in the Philippines has become so complex, sophisticated and innovative that has go beyond developing high-quality products. Today, marketing has evolve into a creative and responsive marketing communications program. Promotions is a combination of personal selling, advertising, sales promotion and publicity. Retailers are in to this kind of marketing tools. They hire employees who can do a promotional program to target the market. Malls built billboard around the structure of the mall, supermarkets has a promo merchandiser to promote specific products, retail stores do their advertisements on social media to catch a big attention to the netizens. Promoting something is an activity offering added incentives to stimulate incremental purchase with the product over the short-run for a reason other than the product’s inherent attributes and benefits.

Place, means distribution channels and physical distribution. It is a vital ingredient of the total marketing mix, that ensures that the products availability to the right quantity, condition, cost and time. The marketing channels are also middlemen may be categorized into distributors, wholesalers and retailers. Most retail business in the Philippines uses this strategy to make sure that they actually target people in a right place. Let’s take look of the malls around the country. Business tycoons invest their money by just putting their business in a right place basically in some location that are populous.

If we combine the product, price promotions and place strategy this is the best retail strategies that will actually benefit the owners of the stores as well as the target market.