My friend Unny seems to have realised the hollowness of those seemingly deep terms in marketing.
Not surprising, given that most of the people who have come up with these terms have probably never encountered the real force behind marketing – “customers“.
It would be a while before “marketing analysts” replace “customer id” with a human face and refer to customers as human beings and not raw data records.
One of the first things that one learns in any B-School is the Kotler 4Ps – Product, Price, Promotion and Place. While broadly, this still stands for a lot of businesses, I do feel one needs to tweak the same given the heightened consumer activism and competition. To me the 4Ps of marketing as it stands today are
1. Profile
2. Profit
3. Personalisation
4. Permission
Profile: Heterogeneity amongst consumers has led to companies developing multiple variants of their products. Product offerings can vary at the simple feature level e.g. Standard accessories available when buying a car or at the complex platform level e.g. Petrol engines versus diesel engines. In the heady days of the product marketing, Henry Ford spoke about people buying cars in their favourite colours as long as it was black. Unfortunately, the same confidence would probably not work today given that consumers have over 50 makes of cars to choose from, not counting the multiple variants with each make. So if you don’t have a product offering for a particular consumer segment, you can wave that segment goodbye forever.
Profiling thus becomes relevant where the entire product strategy gets revolved around consumer profiles – from the macro-level segmentation based on demographics to the micro-level segmentation based on attitudinal and behavioural attributes of consumers.
Profit: Moving beyond just pure price and accounting profit, P for Profit refers to the value added to both the organisation and the consumer. This value in turn is based on such seemingly abstract but mathematically derivable concepts like customer life time value, brand switching costs and attrition propensity.
Personalisation: One message for all, that’s the general principle of mass marketing. However, we know very well that different people read and understand messages differently. They perceive value differently and there fore have to be communicated uniquely. That’s Personalisation. So consumers can be evangelised or scared or urged to buying Life Insurance for savings, protection or tax deductions respectively.
Permission: Finally, today, everybody is busy. They don’t have time. So if you want to do business with them, you need your customers to allow you to talk to them at their convenience. The days when one had to trudge to bank branch between 8:30 p.m. and 2 p.m. to withdraw cash have gone. Now, to maintain your customer base, the bank has to go to the customer through ATMs, Mobile phones or the Internet.
So that’s my take on the 4Ps of marketing. Let’s discuss.
“A survey released by marketing firm, Prospectiv, in October 2005, found that a whopping 96 percent of respondents clip coupons and at least 62 percent do it on a weekly basis. More importantly, more than 50 percent redeem them!”
This is from an article in Marketingfind.com
Click here for the survey release from Prospectiv
The “couponing” technique has always been a favourite for marketers when doing sampling or executing tactical sales promotions to end a sales period. On the web this technique has had its share of adoption though some fraud related execution issues keep bogging.
Fraud: This is particularly prevalent in an online-offline set-up i.e. where the redemption is conducted offline. E-coupons need to be printed and presented at the counter. There is no control on the number of prints taken of the same coupon. Same tactics include
All in all, if the objective is to have maximum product offtake, then the issue of fraud is not really important. Of course, retailers can always create exclusivity clauses by linking the e-coupon to their customer loyalty programmes e.g. at the time of redemption, the coupon needs to be presented along with the customer’s loyalty club membership card.
“But before getting the scissors out, it wouldn’t hurt to phone the store or merchant to make sure it’s legit. There are those unsavory types out there who are spitting out bogus coupons.”
Bogus e-couponing is rampant. It is always wise to restrict e-couponing making it an exception rather than the norm. There also needs to be adequate coordination between marketing and the redemption/retail counters so that the genuine e-coupons are recognized and honoured at the stores.
Seth Godin’s latest book “All Marketers Are Liars” has spawned his new blog. There are some free excerpts of the book available. The blog has instances of what Godin calls “marketing lies”. However, it seems to have been abandoned now. The last post is dated July 28th 2005.
There’s a lot of use of the term “worldview” in his book. Marketing is about telling a story that would appeal to the prevailing “worldview” of the audience.
Looking up “worldview” in the dictionary, I get the following
Source: answers.com
So, in effect, what Seth Godin is implying is that marketers make up stories and arguments that fit to the audience’s worldview and therefore gain acceptance. Which means, if the general worldview is that the organic and herbal stuff are good, then soap manufacturers have no hesitation to add some green colour to their products and market it as “New Herbal whatever”.
