Place refers to the location of your business and the accessibility of your products through retailers or via direct channels such as telephone sales and the Internet. If you limit access to your products to potential purchasers, you are 'shooting yourself in the foot'.

Business location is critical in the case of retail businesses and those businesses that rely on local or passing customers (such as accountants, solicitors, medical clinics and other professional services).

If location is important, you need to evaluate:

• Passing pedestrian and traffic flow
• Direct competition in the immediate area
• Complementary business in the immediate area
• A key function of the sales force is to get the retail trade 'on side'
• Parking facilities
• Rent costs
• Location in relation to residential or commercial zones from which potential customers are drawn

Distribution of your product is crucial in the case of manufactured products that do not rely on local customers but have a much wider state or national distribution network.
In this case, distribution of the product is crucial. There are often many paths (i.e. channels), which a product can take in going from your shop to the customer. A channel "map" can be drawn in order to visualise this keeping in mind all the middlemen, agents, shops, stores, etc. along the way. Defining a channel strategy is not simply an arbitrary matter. Bear in mind that all middlemen along the way are, in essence, in partnership with you to sell something to the end-user. Therefore, your product and its other 3 P's must be such that various resellers in your channel have their needs (e.g. margin objectives, volumes) met.
At the risk of oversimplifying, a good practical way to determine, or at least analyze, appropriate channels for your product would be to start at the point of final purchase. Who is the final consumer or user of your product? Where does that person look when buying your type of product? If she buys this product from an office products retail store, then where does that retailer obtain his products... and so on. Once the various channels have been identified, it is easier to determine which ones make the most sense or which ones offer the path of least resistance.
In a broader context, 'place' can also relate to customer accessibility to you. In some cases, you need to question:

• Can customers negotiate and complete business transactions by telephone or via the Internet?
• Do customers have easy access to your sales personnel?
• Can customers in remote locations transact business with you via authorised agents or distributors?