Another Four P’s of Marketing

You’re no doubt familiar with the Four P’s of Marketing: product, price, place, and promotion. In this era of marketing 2.0, however, those Four P’s may no longer be enough. Marketing specialist Affinion Group suggests supporting the traditional Four P’s with what it calls, in a white paper of the same name, the New 4 P’s of Customer Engagement Marketing. What are these new principles, you ask?

Perspective. This boils down to analysing the available data to better understand the behaviour of your customers and prospects so that you can determine how best to market to them. “Simple demographic analysis is no longer enough,” Affinion states. “Perspective demands uncovering underlying motivations through expert segmentation and psychographic analysis to precisely target the best responders.”

Purpose. What does your brand stand for? How does your audience perceive your brand? How can you ensure that your brand communicates what it stands for and its unique selling proposition to the various segments of your audience?

Proliferation. The number of channels and media available to communicate with customers and prospects has proliferated. This is great for consumers, in that they have a wider range of options in which to engage with a company. For the same reason, it provides an opportunity for companies, but also a challenge. “Incorporating only one or simply a few of the many available marketing channels into an engagement strategy will severely limit the number of customers a company can engage, and could potentially exclude a major demographic segment,” Affinion writes.

Praise. We all like to be recognised for our efforts. So it stands to reason that customers will think more highly of a company that rewards them for their patronage than one that doesn’t. The rewards, or praise, don’t have to take the form of the traditional frequent-buyer programme. Awarding the writer of the month’s most entertaining product review a £10 voucher, for instance, is one way of praising his engagement with your company. Providing your Twitter followers with advance notice of a free-shipping promotion is another. The proliferation of channels does, in fact, make it that much easier to create distinctive ways of praising your customers.