Becky Carroll recently engaged in a bit of nostalgia at the Customers Rock! blog—nostalgia for the 2008 MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer last fall. "While there, I spent a lot of time talking to my fellow speakers [and attendees] about what social media means to customer loyalty," she recalls. "If we think about the '4 Ps of marketing' (product, price, place, and promotion), they are all still applicable to the new-media world we are working in today," she notes. But there's a new, 5th P, she adds: participation.
"If we get our customers to participate with us on an ongoing basis [instead of just talking at them], we learn so much more about them. … This will lead to (on the customer's part) trust, better engagement, preference, word-of-mouth, and ultimately brand loyalty," she argues.
She then offers a short video of her fellow 2008 Mixer panelist Chris Brogan, who gives his take on today's customer empowerment: "We all have generations [before] us who [yelled] at their TV … and [threw] their radio across the room. But now, they can shoot back," he warns.
So, how do today's marketers best serve these newly enabled consumers? By engaging them through community. "I think an audience is something that you talk at," Carroll concludes. "[A] community is something that you talk with and participate in."
The Po!nt: Add some give-and-take to your repertoire. Today's marketing landscape is a level playing field, on which the seller and the consumer participate equally, through community.
Source: Customers Rock! Read the full post here.
Join us this fall at the MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer 2009.
by Christina "CK" Kerley
Comments
by Polarity Inc. Wed Jul 8, 2009
I disagree with adding a "5th P" -- participation is not a new marketing mix variable, rather it is a new dimension across the original marketing mix variables.
That is, the beauty of social media is that it provides two-way communication (participation) across the 4 P's. Examples:
(1) Product - feedback loops, surveys, product suggestions, design contests, etc. provide excellent insights to product marketing for product features, product line extensions, etc.
(2) Price - the same feedback loops and online brand monitoring give the marketer insights relative the appropriate price points, warranty, and other variables.
(3) Promotion - giving customers the ability to participate in the promotional campaigns (+ multivariate testing), and collecting CRM data to tailer offers means customer participation can influence the offer mix.
(4) Place - channel purchase data (including analytics), plus the same dialog noted above, provides clues as to how/where customers want to buy so that distribution strategies are implemented to make buying easy.
In other words, participation can be enabled across all the marketing mix variables if the corporate marketer views the customer as a "partner in the process" -- not an audience that gets talked at after-the-fact.
Think about it :)
by JoAnna Brandi Thu Jul 9, 2009
I would add one more "P" and that one would be for Positivity. When a customer leaves any interaction feeling heard, valued and appreciated they leave with a positive feeling. It matters little whether the customer was upset when they walked in to the conversation, or neutral about it. When we have the ability to engage the customer in a positive way and build the relationship in the process by adding to the emotional bank account, everybody wins.