Rethinking the four Ps of marketing

Thanks to Guy Kawasaki, I got to read John Sviokla's and Antony Paoni's article about Marketing Remix. It argues fairly persuasively that the Internet has disrupted traditional four P strategies of marketing.

Why is this phenomenon so important to business leaders? – because the traditional marketing model is insufficient to address the reality of today’s customers. The entire science of marketing has been developed to understand who buys, why they buy, and how they buy. The traditional marketing mix is made up of product, place, promotion, price -- all consistent with a positioning for the product or service. The power of this model was to point out the key tools that firms have to bring their product or service to market successfully.

Each of these concepts becomes much more complex and diffuse in this new world. "Place" is not so obvious, for the place where people shop is now a combination of physical and informational environments.

Promotion is not so clear, because while formal, outbound efforts like advertising and couponing will continue, marketers must also acknowledge the self-organized nature of user-defined ratings of products and services. These are influential and out of control of the marketer. It is now much more about word of mouth -- turbocharged by peer-to-peer communications like the phone and the internet.

The article does a great job of articulating some possible causes of shifts we've seen in our latest research, such as the decline in marketing satisfaction, the rise of non-traditional marketing budgets and the decrease in traditional advertising spending.. It also provides more ammunition for why successful marketing companies today are Overall, it's an excellent roadmap for rethinking today's marketing strategy in the context of the tyranny of too much.

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