Better Marketing Theory

Did you fall asleep reading the title? If not, read on….this gets more interesting.

Everything we do in marketing and sales is based on marketing theory. Strategies, advertisements, etc. are all based on our assumptions of how people behave and what makes them decide how to buy. One of the basics of marketing, which many have probably heard of, is the 4 P’s, or your marketing mix.

The 4 P’s consist of:
Product- What are you selling?
Price- How much does it cost?
Promotion- How will you spread the word?
Placement- How will you distribute the product/service?

Author and guru Seth Godin is something of an original thinker in the field of Marketing. In his latest blog post, he tells marketers to forget the 4 P’s and move on to the 5 elements of Marketing.

His elements are:
Data- This is just observing what people actually do. Data is foundational to every big company’s decision making process, and should be the same for small business. Statistics may be boring, but they are crucial to marketing.
Stories- These are what define your business/jobs/products/services. He argues that stories are really all we have to work with as humans.

He says that Data and Stories are the foundation on which the rest of the theory is built.

Products (services)-This is what your story is about. He gives the example that “if your story is that you are cutting edge, then you product better be.”
Interactions--This is the new version of “promotion.” It is all the ways that you make in impression on prospective customers with what you are offering. This could be advertisements, it could be your personal, one on one interaction with customers.
Connection-The end goals of marketing are for you to make a connection with a customer and for the customers with connect with each other. If the first four elements were done correctly, making connections is much easier.

I think that this approach works well with the way marketing works today. Marketing is more about building relationships than it ever has been, due in part to the way that new generations of people buy. It also leaves more room for the new age of internet marketing, social media, etc.

Studying marketing theory is important. Even the old “4 P’s” help give the small business owner balance. Without the theory, most business owners spend all their time on promotion, and nothing else. But better than just knowing the text book theory is learning from the leaders of the field. I don’t know if Seth’s five elements will replace the 4 P’s in marketing textbooks, but business owners would all do well to study his work.

Mike Freeman
Life long learner and marketer for small businesses in Maine