The 4P’s of marketing in a digitally transformed world
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about my education in marketing and advertising. I actually studied this stuff in college, can you believe it?
I had a college professor named Professor Bengtsen who was tough but really helped further ingrain my love for the business. His class was called Elements of Advertising, and in it, we learned a lot about the basics of the industry and about the first leaders and innovators in the business, like David Ogilvy, Leo Burnett, and Neil Borden. I still find a lot of inspiration in going back to classic books like “Confessions of an Advertising Man” and quotes from Leo Burnett.
Often, as I read this type of content, I think about how I can apply these learnings to today’s world.
Which gets me to why I’m writing this blog today. I started thinking about the 4 P’s and whether they’re still applicable in today’s digitally transformed world. Check out the video I did on LinkedIn on the same subject here.
What are the 4 P’s of Marketing?
The 4 Ps are:
Product
Price
Place
Promotion
Together, they make the “Marketing Mix”, and those are the four essential items you need in order to successfully market a product or service.
Neil Borden and the Marketing Mix
The concept of the Marketing Mix was created by a man named Neil Borden in the 1950s. His theory was that in order to successfully market a product or service, you must have four pieces of information: Product, Price, Place and Promotion.
What do the 4 P’s stand for?
Product
What are you selling? Is it a product or a service? If a product, does it come in different sizes, colors, flavors?
Price
How much do you charge for your product or service? Is there variability in that pricing? Does it go on sale? Do you discount for volume? Do you have a wholesale price?
Place
Where do you sell your product? This used to be a very simple concept. Back in the 50s and the 60s, you would walk into a store. You would see a candy bar sold in only a few spots - by the register, in the candy aisle, and occasionally on a special display or endcap elsewhere in the store. If that candy bar was sold direct to consumer, somebody might be ringing your doorbell and selling it to you directly. That was pretty much it when it came to Place back in the 60s.
Promotion
How do you talk about the product? What is your brand’s message? What’s your promotional message? What’s your brand’s unique selling proposition, (USP - another old-school marketing term I learned in college. We can talk about that one another time).
How do the 4 P’s apply in today’s digitally transformed world?
What got me thinking about this topic was - how much our world has changed over the last 10 years. With the rise of eCommerce, social media, iPhones, Zoom, Google, our lives have gone digital.
Now that we all live so much of our lives within the digital world, do the original marketing concepts like the 4 P’s hold true? Or do we need to adapt the way we think about marketing because of it?
My answer is yes and yes. Yes, this is a concept that still holds. But yes, we also need to adapt our thinking and the way we market because of the digital transformation we’ve all been living through.
The biggest change to the 4 P’s is to Place
Now that we all live online to some extent, “Place” has changed. Place has now become both the focus in marketing as well as the main source of overwhelm for modern business owners and modern marketers. Back in the 50’s, there just weren’t that many places you could sell your product.
Direct to Consumer is no longer exclusive to catalogs, door-to-door salespeople and Ron Popeil (the Set it and Forget it guy) selling the Showtime Grill on late night tv. It’s everywhere - eCommerce stores, on social media, over text message, in blogs, and even in QR codes. Today, you can also sell your product on Amazon, your service on Upwork, and your course through affiliate marketers. And don’t forget influencers - Influencers can help sell your product or service on their own channels, through their own social media, through their websites, through their blogs, etc.
There’s a simple answer to “Place” overwhelm
While the 4 P’s concept still stands the test of time, I think “Place” has become a source of overwhelm for many. There are just so many different ways to sell a product, it feels like too much.
When our clients come to me feeling like this, asking whether they should look at a new channel or opportunity, my answer is always the same. I always say, let’s go back to your strategy.
When you have the strong foundation of a strategy, you know who your audience is, what’s in it for them, what they care about, where they go, what kind of questions they ask, etc. When you have that strong strategic foundation, decisionmaking gets a lot easier when opportunities come up–you can go back to your strategy to identify whether those opportunities work with the strategy, or whether they’re just another shiny object.
Strategy might be the simple answer, but it’s not always simple to develop a marketing strategy
I know it doesn’t always feel easy to create a marketing strategy. But that’s why we’re here. We can help you with that strategic foundation. If you’re so inclined, set up some time with us to discuss what’s on your mind here.
