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August 7, 2006
Are You in Marketing Death Valley?
(Posted by francois to: Strategy | marketing | marketing death valley )
Have you been in marketing for awhile? Were you trained in marketing? If so, chances are that you’ve been wondering what happened to the “traditional” marketing rules (if there ever was such a thing) - and what replaced them.
There is no question that tectonic shifts have redefined the fundamentals of marketing as we knew it – leaving many marketers feeling like they are in the midst of crossing the equivalent of “Marketing Death Valley.”
At the very least – take a look at one of the fundamental concepts of marketing - the 4P’s of the marketing mix (Product, Price, Place, and Promotion). In the early 90's Prof Robert F. Lauterborn suggested that the 4 P’s should be replaced with the 4C’s (Consumer needs, consumer Cost, Convenience to buy, and Communications). Either way, do you believe that those are still useful as fundamental concepts for defining the marketing mix? How much can you tweak "price" in your marketing mix if some of your competitors came out with free products? What can you do about "place," now that it has become mostly ubiquitous and almost free? And how much should you spend on "promotion," when the new marketing scarcity is "customer attention" instead of shelf space, and where "findability" is the new name of the game? Sure, in some spaces you can still gain some differentiation by changing some aspects of the "product" mix - but most of those are very short-lived differentiations.
In a series of posts during the next couple of months we will be looking at what happened to the traditional rules of marketing – and try to understand what the new fundamentals are. Feel free to join this conversation and help us to make this series of posts worthwhile.
[Tags: marketing death valley marketing marketing rules attention scarcity 4 P's marketing innovation]
Posted by francois at August 7, 2006 12:24 AM | Bookmark This
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Comments
Just wanted to say I am looking forward to the blog posts that will continue after and pertain to this. I'm still a biz student but I love business and marketing. But going through my marketing book I noticed the 4P's in relation to the marketing mix and became concerned because of much of the changes that are occurring. I fear that I am going to be educated based on the old marketing ways while living in the new marketing era.
Posted by: Nathan at August 7, 2006 11:56 AM
Are you jumping the gun to so quickly dump the 4p's. In my mind they are still a good way to make sure you have covered the various aspects that make up a market offering. Yes the nature of price and pricing is changing, but money will have to change hands somewhere for the enterprise to be viable. Promotion as defined by my B-School professor is fundamentally different than today (hardly even recognizable) but you still have to tell someone that you have a product to sell. ...and so on... my point is let's not make the generalization that all that is old is bad, let's just try to understand how it is different.
Posted by: Lee White at August 8, 2006 12:27 PM
I agree with Lee here. It is not necessarily the 4 P's that should change, instead we should be looking at how the environment has changed in which businesses interact with their (prospective) customers.
Increased transparency and accessibility of information about products (manufacturing, pricing etc) and the companies that make them, combined with consumers' ability to communicate about and exchange this information through social media tools (web 2.0) has led to a shift in the (im)balance between company and customer.
With the consumer firmly in the driving seat (and knowing it), businesses need to reconsider how to stay competitive and continue to attract customers. It is no longer about what the company can do (the 4 P's), but what the consumer is allowed to do (through involvement and influence) that will shape new products and thus make up the minds of the consumers around the world.
Posted by: Lev at August 8, 2006 3:44 PM
I do not disagree. We should not rush to throw working concepts out the window. But rather than force-fitting new concepts (i.e., customer life-cycle value) into old models (i.e., 4P's), should we not be better off to re-evaluate certain fundamentals - including the marketing mix fundamental?
Do you really believe that your marketing person still should be thinking 4P's every time she is thinking about the marketing mix? To me that is a little frightening at this stage.
Posted by: francois gossieaux at August 9, 2006 8:20 AM
I am not advocating that we stick with the 4p's as if it were written in stone. It is just that that mindset is fundamental to the thinking of so many marketers today. My experience is that rushing to the next new thing without bridging to what people already know is a difficult proposition. As a good friend of mine likes to say, "When change meets culture, culture always wins." In this case I think the old school models can be leveraged to educate people about the new environment.
Posted by: Lee White at August 9, 2006 11:45 AM
