The Death of Marketing? Mix it up.

Here is the deal – the 4 P’s “are what they are”, but perhaps they need a little revitalizing. The emergence of later market realities across industries are resulting in a need for a different approach. On the extreme, some have predicted the demise of marketing – specifically Piers Fawkes:

Certainly the conditions are right. I mean, if “marketing” were a brand, we would have redesigned and [tag]relaunched[/tag] it a long time ago. As it is, the idea stands for an extraordinary bundle of things. It is a very messy concept indeed, and the practice…well, the practice is even messier.

So I thought about it death? Probably not but it could be something else.  I centered on the following questions “is it a relaunch or brand extension?” So perhaps Marketing, as a discipline, is just a late stage market and requires a different approach.

So as with any late stage market, or in this case, a discipline, the first step is to look for innovation – find an emerging P. Various folks have indicated [tag]web 2.0[/tag] could be considered an innovation fulcrum, but continues to demonstrate an emergence of new channels which is changing the effort to impact change. These new channels require a portfolio based approach which focuses on optimizing revenue by channel and is effectively product agnostic and segment focused.

So we have the [tag]4 P’s[/tag] of today:

• Product
• Price
• Placement (as a geographer I can’t use place, it’s too specific)
• Promotion

So if the 4 P’s represent the market mix, the 5 P is managing the mix against multiple channels – legacy, emerging and under development.   Marketing teams continue to be challenged with only so much capacity and budget.   With limited resources a ROI based strategy is required. To that end, the 5th P, portfolio management, requires you balance investment, expectations and the ability to execute in such a way that you don’t end up over invested in a channel which isn’t delivering the optimal return.

Not all products are good for all channels and not all channels perform the same for like/similar products so a detailed set of instrumented processes and metrics are required to drive a successful portfolio management strategy. So is the 5th P, Portfolio, is effectively a brand extension of marketing or is it more of an assortment extension?