A few years ago, I remember reading a book called Marketing Effectively by communications professional and author Moi Ali.

One statement about marketing stayed with me long after I finished the book: marketing is “making what you can sell, not selling what you can make.”

In simple terms, when designing a business, it should be built around customers’ needs. However, many organisations take the opposite approach. They create a product first and then rely on promotion and sales tactics to persuade customers to buy it.

But what if businesses focused on fully harnessing the benefits of effective and strategic marketing from the start? When done well, marketing can drive community growth, increase sales, generate recommendations, and encourage positive feedback.

Over time, these outcomes contribute to stronger profits and better overall marketing performance.

So how can organisations tap into these benefits? One effective approach is by developing a marketing mix.

As someone who enjoys cooking, I often think of the marketing mix as preparing a delicious meal. To get the flavour just right, the key ingredients must be blended carefully. In marketing, those ingredients are product, price, place, promotion, and public relations.

For the mix to work well, the product must meet a genuine customer need. The price should remain affordable for customers while still generating profit. The product must also be easily accessible, and promotion should build credibility and trust, encouraging customers to make a purchase. Of course, just as everyone has different tastes, every organisation may require a slightly different combination of these ingredients to create the right mix.

One ingredient that often varies the most is price. A low price can sometimes be associated with lower quality, while a high price may discourage potential buyers. In many cases, a better strategy is to sell based on value. When a product clearly solves a problem, customers tend to focus less on the price. It is also wise for businesses to research competitors’ pricing and position their own prices accordingly.

Once your “meal”, or marketing mix, is ready, what is the next step? Like many of us do when we prepare something delicious, you might take a photo and send it to family or friends. If the image looks appealing enough, they may even want to come over and try it themselves.

This idea closely mirrors the role of public relations.

By sharing appealing images, stories, and updates about a product or service, businesses can shape positive customer perceptions. This can be done in several ways: issuing press releases about new product launches, highlighting sponsorships of community events, publishing blogs that explain how products or services benefit customers, and sharing achievements and updates across social media platforms.

In fact, many professionals now believe that social media is one of the most effective public relations tools available to modern businesses. It allows organisations to play a more active and responsive role in building relationships with their audiences. Through social media, companies can manage communities, identify potential brand threats, discover influencers, engage in social listening, and communicate important announcements directly with their audiences.

In today’s digital landscape, the combination of a well-balanced marketing mix and thoughtful public relations can make a significant difference in how a brand is perceived and how successfully it grows.