Due to an unfortunate misunderstanding, the head of marketing and the lead engineer got into a heated debate.

TIPS & TRICKS

7 Building Blocks – Why the 4 Ps of Marketing Are Not Enough

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Most businesspeople are familiar with the famous “Marketing Mix,” a conception of selling formulated in the 1950s by Harvard Professor Neil Borden. This was further refined by E. Jerome McCarthy into what we now know of as the “4 Ps of Marketing.” These 4 Ps are:

Product: What you are selling is, invariably, part of the marketing. How does it look and perform? What kinds of problems does it solve? What kind of quality are we talking about here?

Price: It has been said that price is the first bit of branding a product gets. When a customer who is unfamiliar with your products or organization sees your product on a shelf in Walmart, they are naturally going to assume that it is a value, money-saving brand if it’s priced lower than comparable products around it. They are going to assume that it is a high quality or aspirational brand if it is the highest priced. How much you charge for something influences the commercial message and the consumer experience.

Place: Distribution is a crucial part of the marketing mix for more than one reason. The first is practical – if you don’t have a method of distribution, people will be unable to buy your product. The second is a branding issue – people are going to make assumptions about your offering depending on where they encounter it. In other words, “place” sheds associations to the products found therein. If a watchmaker sells his or her product in a TJ Maxx, a retail discount store, the average consumer is going to think of it very differently than if he saw it in a Gucci Outlet. Where your product is becomes part of the message and identity.

Promotion: This one should be obvious – We have to get the word out. The content of our messaging, the media that we choose to employ, the slogans, the endorsements, and the discounts all make up a crucial aspect of our marketing. Additionally, who is doing the promotion can be just as important. A grassroots, customer-led promotion may be deemed more reliable than a heavily ad-supported promotion push, but there are pros and cons to each approach.
It is a helpful model for understanding the 4 Ps and deciding how to employ them as part of your broader selling strategy. Unfortunately, it leaves out some key concepts big enough to make the difference between success and failure.

The Missing 3

USC Professor of Marketing and Business Administration Ira Kalb, who ran a successful consulting and training firm, preferred to teach the “7 Building Blocks of Marketing.” It includes the four concepts listed above but adds three others:

1. Positioning
2. Corporate Image
3. Marketing Information Systems (M.I.S.)

Positioning: In a typically crowded marketplace, distinguishing your offering from all of the others is of paramount importance. Positioning is the series of strategic and tactical decisions that you make in order to attach a certain perception to your product. In many ways, this building block ties together the first 4 Ps – it provides a common thread for marketers to use. Is there room in the market for a “tough-guy” version of Product B? Then the fonts will have to say that, the packaging will have to say that, the spokesperson will have to be a tough guy, the pricing should reflect that, etc. Positioning is the intentional associations that you want customers to have when they think of your product, and then you use the other 4 Ps to support these ideas even as they also seek to increase sales. Strong positioning can greatly increase brand loyalty, keep competitors at bay, and help you identify and connect with your target market.

Corporate Image: Corporate Image is similar to positioning in some ways, but instead of merely branding and positioning a product, you are investing in the public perception of your entire organization. It’s no longer a question of simply, “What do people think of Air Jordans?” It’s a question of “What do people think of Nike”? This is something that large corporations understand – and invest in heavily. Among smaller businesses, however, this is often neglected. The utility of investing in a strong corporate image, consisting of awareness, perception, and positioning, is that it makes it easier to brand subsequent products. Apple, for instance, has a strong, clear corporate image. So when Apple Vision Pro was released, consumers already basically knew what to expect, knew how to think of the product, and more readily embraced the technology because there were loyal Apple fans who aligned with the mission, values, and associations put out by the corporation.

Marketing Information Systems (M.I.S.): If you can’t measure it, you’re just guessing. That’s the idea behind the M.I.S. building block. Public perception, tastes, and priorities are always changing. A message that resonated with the Midwest in 2020 might not resonate in 2024. A 50% off sale didn’t affect customer’s perceptions of your product quality the first time you did it, but maybe after the third time, people started to wonder. A Marketing Information System is an integrated technological and analytical protocol that allows you to test, measure, and improve the other six building blocks. This can consist of retargeting cookies, customer satisfaction surveys, focus groups, split tests, and demographic studies. M.I.S. asks – how can I follow up on the impressions my product and/or brand gives to both customers and potential customers? What is working and what isn’t? Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and hoping that it pays off. Constantly measuring the success of your product, price, place, promotion, positioning, and corporate image is, in contrast, high-level marketing.

Quick Hits

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• CNBC reports on what industry experts say retail will look like in 5 years from now.
• Open AI again stuns the tech world by unveiling Sora, its text-to-video application, capable of creating stunning, nuanced visuals with only simple, text descriptions as its input.
• The Armstrong Institute of Biblical Archeology lists the top 10 biblical archeology discoveries of 2023.
• U.S. credit card debt now tops $1 trillion – but are we really surprised?