How the 4 Ps of Marketing can run your Campaigns Successfully
Glenn Burgess
Glenn P Burgess Author, Speaker - UK's No1 Fintech & SaaS Marketing expert.
As the years pass by, it gets more difficult to stay up to date with the latest marketing trends such as Chatbots, Artificial Intelligence, Conversational Commerce & Experience Optimization.
The old age concepts have successful campaigns which are guiding modern marketers to success.
For instance, let’s talk about a quote from Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins;
“The man who wins out and survives does so only because of superior science and strategy.”
This was published in 1923 which is almost 100 years ago! But it still holds water today.
AI makes the identification of the trends much faster. However, the key to success is having in-depth data to inform your marketing campaigns.
Whenever I hear someone saying that an old age concept for marketing no longer works, makes me confused. Considering that; The modern tactics that are currently taking over the marketing world are not new in fact they are simply new angles on established tactics.
The concept of the 4 Ps of marketing gets this more often than the others.
What Are the Four Ps of Marketing?
The 4 Ps are a method to help keep marketers on track. They relate to the key elements that all good marketing promos should optimize for. They are super simple as most of the great concepts are.
Here’s the four Ps break down:
- Product
- Price
- Place
- Promotion
Let’s talk about them in a little more detail.
Product
Over the passage of years, I have worked with a lot of brands who have different degrees of success. Whereas, the brand with whom I experienced the best level of success was also the brand that felt the easiest to market.
Why?
Because their product was amazing. Also, it was really easy to implement. It was more like a marketer’s dream.
At the time of developing your product, you have to think of more than just “This is our product, it’s for [demographic].”
If you take a look at any modern product development, you will notice that it is an iterative process that includes customer feedback:
The points that you have to keep in consideration for product marketing are given below;
- Who the product is for
- The problems the user faces
- How you solve the problems
- Features & benefits related to the user’s daily needs
- Product name
- Branding
- Variations
- And much more.
Moreover, you have to make sure that what you are offering is the perfect solution for your target audience.
Price
Price plays a vital role in the Ps. Although, most people put little thought about pricing, they look at competitor A & say something like “They are charging X so we will just undercut them by 5%.”
Now, that is where the problem arises & in the way you miss the opportunity.
Considering that the price is the evaluation of the value that the product holds & the current price points within the market with relevant discounts & importantly how the consumers will view the price.
For instance, let’s take the pricing experiment that Dan Ariely ran. While looking at how 100 MIT students subscribed to The Economist, he noticed that 16 people chose A & 84 people chose C. They determined that B was useless, so it was removed as an option:
However, it turns out that B was an anchor price that made C seem more attractive. Without B, only 32 people chose the more expensive option (C).
The key to make your brand grow is that you will have to make a lot of assumptions about pricing by running tests to find out what value is the best for your customers & your company.
Place
The most important considerations for a business was the location when there was no internet. All you had to do is to think of the perfect location & you’ll have a great number of customers.
On the other hand, your customers are spread across dozens of channels, both digital & physical.
An example of the numerous choices of social channels are given below:
You have to figure out that on which platforms are your costumers most likely to convert.
Do they start their purchase journey on Google or interact with product posts on social media? If they’re on social media, which networks do they prefer? Within those networks, which accounts do they follow? And so on.
You have to understand where your customers are & what they like to engage with. This sums up to our final P….
Promotion
A few years back I read something from Derek Halpern about the promotion of content. He said it is an 80/20 split which means that 20% of your time goes into creation & 80% into promotion.
He believed that the only method for you to see your content grow was the same when it comes to any product or service.
Having a great product at the right price in the perfect location is one thing. Whereas, if you are not promoting it to those who are most likely to buy, then it is good for nothing.
Promotion is the most important element of any marketing campaign. Moreover, let’s take it as it is the fuel for what you have to build & the final element that takes your best plan & make them real.
To make it really work. The things you have to consider in particular are:
- When & where can you get your audience to see your messages
- The best time & channel to promote through
- What kind of promotional message will resonate with your audience
- How your competitors promote & what can you learn from them
Although, many people would disagree with me that this was not a brief breakdown of the 4 Ps but from the examples that I have added, I think that they are still relevant.
Why People Question the Four Ps?
Consumers are slaves to good marketing. When you see the lines outside Apple, when they release a new phone, which only has a few updates in the features.
However, consumers cannot hold a flame to marketers when it comes to believing the hype.
As marketers, we live where every person in our network starts promoting the same thing & explains how it is better than the previous ones.
Let’s take, “Article on the 4 Ps Being Dead”, written by Phil Masiello, as an example.
According to Phil, we need a new framework because:
“Building a marketing plan around people, places, prices, & promotions is old thinking. It comes from an age when we had no real consumer data. A lot of conjecture & survey results.”
I, somehow agree on this. Marketing develops at an alarming rate & it is true that the original 4 P methodology needs to be updated but to think that it is dead is not a good advice.
A part of me agrees with Phil’s belief that the 4 Ps do need an update. However, a much larger part of me thinks that he is controlling the belief of their downfall for his own agency’s profit.
Here’s why & how the 4 Ps are still relevant.
A Modern Approach to the 4 Ps
I don’t think people like Phil are on a completely wrong path. The concepts that have been used for years in marketing will always need an upgrade & are not to be replaced entirely.
The psychological triggers that cause people to buy your product or service are the same as they have always been. People want more money, more power, more influence, more comfort & more free time.
Simply, People just want more and better. Now, the difference is how you discover what they want more & how will you help them achieve it. This is highly important because 76% of your customers expect you to know exactly what they want & need from you:
Luckily, the same consumers are highly engaged with the brands they want to purchase from:
The difference that keeps the 4 Ps alive is the consumer.
Price, product, promotion & place are all important in marketing. However, they have to be led by the consumer.
Although, there has never been an easy way to figure out the right actions for each & every P. So, you have to engage the users at all stages of implementation to make sure that you are moving in the right direction.
Firstly, you need to conduct an in-depth customer research to give you, your starting point. Then, implement your initial campaigns & offering. Also, you need to re-engage your users to see how your actions can be improved.
Four Ps Plus
There are some marketers who have decided that the 4 Ps needs to be improved. Although, I would love to say that I am the only person who thinks of adding another P but that would be a lie.
Let’s take a quote of the famous Seth Godin, who opens his book Purple Cow with this:
“Something disturbing has happened, though. The Ps just aren’t enough. This is a book about a new P, a P that is suddenly exceptionally important.”
Seth goes on to explain that you need another P & consider it as “Purple Cow”, or rather how to stand out from the competition.
In this piece from Johnathan Bacon published on MarketingWeek, there is a belief that the four Ps are still relevant:
Purpose & Penetration were the two new Ps which were added by Britvic as explained by Jonathan.
However, the core of their campaigns is still based on the 4 Ps.
That means, the 4 Ps are still relevant. However, with the addition of all the news channels, the competition is getting tougher & the 4 Ps are no longer enough. Although, they should be the core of your campaign but side by side you need to look at something else.
Purpose & penetration were the two new Ps which were added by Britvic as explained by Jonathan.
However, the core of their campaigns is still based on the 4 Ps.
That means, the 4 Ps are still relevant. However, with the addition of all the news channels, the competition is getting tougher & the 4 Ps are no longer enough. Although, they should be the core of your campaign but side by side you need to look at something else.
Don’t Ignore the 4 Ps
The core of any successful marketing campaign is the 4 Ps. They help to focus on figuring out what your audience wants & how can you get in front of them.
On the other hand, we have lost sight of this. As marketers, we have turned our focus from serving people to addressing algorithmic needs & are not trying to help people, but to game the system. That’s the reason why there are so many brands who are doing so much but getting so little.
So, optimize your campaigns for your customers by first focusing on the 4 Ps as most of the brands are not optimizing for their customers but for the vanity metrics & “trendy” marketing measures of success to go viral.
