Introduction
As of December 2010, there were 207 petrol stations in Singapore. These stations are owned and operated by four major players in the petroleum retail industry. They are; Shell Eastern Petroleum Pte. Ltd (Shell), ExxonMobil Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd (Esso), Chevron Corporation (Caltex) and Singapore Petroleum Company (SPC). In this essay, we’ll be looking at how these four players apply the Marketing Mix in running their petrol stations across Singapore.
Marketing Mix is defined as “A combination of the product itself, the price of the product, the place where it is made available and the activities that introduce it to consumers that creates a desired response among a set of predefined consumers.” (Soloman, 2011). Using the ‘Four Ps’ (McCarthy, 1981, p 42) of Product, Price, Promotion and Place is probably the best way to express it.
Each element of the ‘Four Ps’ will affect each other, and they must be used together in combination to satisfy customers need.
Marketing Mix
Marketers use a combination of marketing tactics from the marketing mix to develop marketing strategies. The marketing mix is a set of controlled variables that formulate the strategic position of a product or service in the market place. The primary goal of marketing is to optimise the marketing mix, offering the best possible combination of the four P's to maximise the effectiveness of marketing efforts.
Product
1)Singapore
Difficult to enter the petol retail market
Retail petrol markets do not have room to be compitive to a certain extent.
There is a high market concentration of petrol in Singapore because that is a lack of independent players.
A petrol retailer requires a number of petrol stations located in Singapore to be a viable player in Singapore. This makes it difficult for new players to enter the market today.
The four players are vertically integrated with their refineries here in