Updating the Four P’s

According to the book

Many years ago, McCarthy classified various marketing activities into marketing-mix tools of four broad kinds, which he called the four Ps of marketing: product, price, place, and promotion.

The marketing variables under each P are shown in Figure 1.3.

Given the breadth, complexity, and richness of marketing, however—as exemplified by holistic marketing—clearly these four Ps are not the whole story anymore. Updating them to reflect the holistic marketing concept results in a more representative set that encompasses modern marketing realities: people, processes, programs, and performance, as in Table 1.2.

People

People reflects, in part, internal marketing and the fact that employees are critical to marketing success. Marketing will only be as good as the people inside the organization. It also reflects the fact that marketers must view consumers as people to understand their lives more broadly and not just as shoppers who consume products and services.

Processes

Processes are all the creativity, discipline, and structure brought to marketing management. Marketers must ensure that state-of-the-art marketing ideas and concepts play an appropriate role in all they do, including creating mutually beneficial long-term relationships and imagina-tively generating insights and breakthrough products, services, and marketing activities.

Programs

Programs are all the firm’s consumer-directed activities, encompassing the old four Ps as well as a range of other marketing activities that might not fit as neatly into the old view of marketing.

Regardless of whether they are online or offline, traditional or nontraditional, these activities must be integrated such that their whole is greater than the sum of their parts and they accomplish multiple objectives for the firm.

Performance

Performance reflects, as in holistic marketing, the range of possible outcome measures that have financial and non-financial implications (profitability as well as brand and customer equity) and implications beyond the company itself (social responsibility, legal, ethical, and community related).

Dutch saying: Measuring is knowing, Guessing is missing (Meten is Weten, Gissen is Missen)

Many models are used in marketing, each with its abbreviation or nickname. Because a marketing model is a simplified representation of reality, each model has its limitations. Models are sometimes supplemented on the basis of progressive insight. However, the essence of most models often remains the same.
The 4P-model is stil a good starting point.

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