Many proven marketing processes, like lead generation, branding, PR, and product innovation, are increasingly hard to achieve with any degree of predictability - both in terms of measurable results as well as costs.

The reason for this is that some of the context in which we market products and services has gone through a fundamental transformation, enabled by a participatory technology infrastructure. But unlike what some marketing pundits are claiming - not all the marketing fundamentals have changed. In fact there may be more fundamentals that remained the same than those that changed.

Sticking to the 4P’s, which may be somewhat obsolete, and adding a fifth P for people as some have started doing, we can quickly understand what changed and what did not.

Product

We still have products and services at the center of every marketing activity. And while new tools have enabled us to design products differently - incorporating feedback and ideas from people who are not necessarily within our corporate boundaries, leveraging social motivations in getting people to help us build open source products, etc. - the fundamentals of product management have not changed all that much. At the end of the day, you still need to pick the winning set of features that will make your product successful.

A question one can ask if whether people buy the product because of the product itself, or because of the experience that comes with it, or perhaps because of the “personal identity” that comes with the use of your product. But while this is an interesting question, and while people most likely do not buy the product because of the product itself, whatever the answer is, it is nothing new.

Price

Products and services still have prices. One of the main changes in the last decade or so is that some companies have found successful business model to support a new price point that buyers seem to be addicted to - FREE. Other than that, there really has not been that much change in the field of pricing. And unlike what economists or marketing pundits will lead you to believe, the supply side (the vendor/manufacturer) still very much controls the price the customer is willing to pay for a certain product.

Promotion

So your message is no longer getting through to your target audience. Some people say that attention is the “new” scarcity. An article on the subject said:

“Psychologists tell us that the mind is under a continual bombardment of ideas, all of which are trying to make an impression on it. The prospect, therefore, does not sit around with his mind a blank, calmly waiting for someone or something to capture his attention without a struggle. The salesman enters a field already well occupied and must fight for the undivided attention that is a successful sale.”

…but wait - this was written in Modern Man in 1918! So attention scarcity is not something new. It may be harder, with more competitors vying for what may be a little more collective attention that in 1918 - but it is not a new phenomena.

We of course have way more channels through which we can reach our prospects. But the increased targeting capability that comes with it should make it easier to get our message through to the right person, not harder.

Place (distribution)

Place has a new meaning. Your product no longer needs to be in a physical location in order to be bought. It can now have an ubiquitous presence as an online offering - either in an online store or as paid search term. But that just means that you have additional distribution channels at your disposal - it does not change the fundamentals of distribution strategy.

People

Here may be the biggest misnomer in terms of change. Sure we now have tools that allow us to tune in and tune out things more easily. We may now have a participatory infrastructure that gives everyone a voice, one that turns everyone into a producer. But our brain has been shaped over millions of years to be the way it is today, and the same is true for many of our social norms. Nothing will change the way we evaluate our contributions nor the way we make buying decisions in a few years - it’s just hardwired.

So what changed then?

If so many fundamentals stayed the same, why is it that we can no longer get predictable results with our traditional marketing programs?

For starters, some of the pain may be self-inflicted - think of spammers who killed email marketing or corporate liars who undermined the trust that we have in big corporations and government (although the latter may in fact not be something new either).

Maybe what happened is that consumers are now empowered to call out and shut out bad marketing behaviors that we’ve had all along - people never wanted to be interrupted, they never wanted to be treated as idiots, and they always hated the fact that companies were not listening to them. They just had no channel to let us know that.

So what marketing 2.0 becomes may in fact be what marketing should have been all along.

And some people knew this a long time ago - check out those quotes from the late Peter Drucker as an example:

• “Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.”
• “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself. “
• “The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.”
• “Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it.”

That is what marketing 2.0 is becoming…except that he made some of those statements more than a half century ago…

We hope you will enjoy and join this ongoing conversation on where marketing is going.