The Future of Marketing?
Aug 8th, 2008 by Paul Miser
I just ran across a question on LinkedIn about the future of Marketing and if the 4P’s are still relevant. The only bad thing is that the question was cancelled before I could post. So, I figured I would post it here…
The 4 P’s will always provide the foundation for marketing. You must have a product, a price for it, a place to get it, and also promote it in order to make money. To look at the future of marketing, we need to see how it has evolved. First, we marketed just the commodity (the bare essence of the product). Second, we marketed a product (multiple commodities put together to form a greater value). Next, we wanted service (the company providing the product to help when the product breaks). Then, we wanted an experience with the product/company (the value added emotional and entertaining aspects of a product). That brings us to our current state.
The reasons for these different levels of marketing are raising customer expectations and technological advances. We, as consumers, get bored with the same experience with a product and tend to defect to look for more excitement or for a better experience.
So what is the future? There is a power transition going on right now in marketing from companies and brands ‘pushing’ marketing messages to consumers to consumer generated content ‘pulling’ information from other consumers as well as the company/brand. Well, once again with the rising customer expectations and increase in technology (social networking, proliferation of mobile technology, etc.) we, as consumers, have a need to be engaged with a company/product/service. We now have the technologies to have personalized and individualized conversations with consumers, to track that consumer data, and utilize that data to create 1:1 Marketing communications over multiple forms of media (email, direct mail, online social media, some print media, etc.). These strategies basically create marketing plans for each individual consumer based on the data and conversations with the brand.
So long story short, we are moving in the direction of Customer Engagement. In today’s day and age, everyone wants and deserves a voice. We want brands to fit into our life, not the other way around. After all, it’s not the ‘masses’ that purchase, it’s the ‘individual.’
