Marketing mix for product software

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The marketing mix is composed of the four controllable factors of marketing managers: price, promotion, product, and place (Kern, 2003). There are some characteristics that differ for software products than other mass produced goods such as clothing.

Price – Price of software can be a fixed rate paid to a store or vendor. Additionally, it can be a subscription for usage of software with an application service provider like Salesforce.com. Price can be determined by number of licenses and/or users.

Promotion – Promotion of software can use traditional methods such as advertising. Furthermore, the testing of software products is usually possible before purchasing with either limited trial application for a specific period of time or free-ware containing limited functionality. An example is the month long trial of statistical software from SPSS.

Product – The actual product differs from normal mass produced goods since the vendor company actually stays the owner of the original code and auxiliary materials, while only the usage of the product is sold to customers. (Open source software was created to combat this)

Place – Place refers to the distribution of product software which can either be a shrink-wrapped product located in a store or can be an intangible digital form that can be downloaded off the internet such as Adobe Acrobat 7.0 from adobe.com.