Product Mix
The Marketing Mix

The Product Mix: part of the Marketing Mix, (in the Marketing Plan) continues our endeavours in writing a business plan. The Business Marketing Plan focuses on the product details, product benefits, the product lifecycle, and packaging and labelling, part of your Marketing Strategy.

1. Identify your product

Specify whether what you are going to be selling in a product or a service. It could be that it is a mix of the two.

2. The Product Combination

List your Products as follows:

• Product Item

General Product Description for one particular product.

• Product Line

Is a number of related products. They could be a similar product that comes in different sizes or colours. They could vary in quality or in price. However, they all have a similar purpose and similar characteristics.

• Product Width

This refers to the number of different product lines that a business will have. Lots of product lines will be a wide product mix, just a few product lines would be a narrow product mix.

• Product Depth

The product depth refers to the amount of product items that you are selling within a product line. The larger the volume of product items the larger the product depth.

3. Product Detail

Next to each product write down what the cost of sales are for each product, what is your expected profitability for each product and what is the availability for each product.

Also list for each of your products the features of each product. What are the specifications and characteristics of your products? What can your product do that the customers are looking for.

4. The Product Life Cycle

Identify where your product or service sits within the product lifecycle.

Consider whether your product or service is in the Introduction phase, growth phase, maturity phase or decline phase.

List this with each of your products.

5. Product Packaging

Think about the purpose of your packaging. Packaging obviously has a functional purpose of protecting your product.

Your packaging will also, however, have an influence on the customer’s decision to purchase your product. Product packaging is a good way that you can differentiate your product from your competitors.

Is your packaging going to be branded? What image is it going to create? What information is it going to provide to your customers? Is it just functional? Are there going to be labelling on the packaging, if so what information are they providing.

Describe your packaging and why you have chosen that method.

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