Time was that marketing was about the Four Ps: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. Back when I received my certification as a marketing professional, I was schooled in each of the Four Ps. But somewhere along the way, we lost three of the Ps and were left just with promotion, or as we usually refer to it, messaging.
We marketers have spent a lot of time thinking about how the Internet has affected promotion. Whole new areas of tactics have cropped up, ranging from email and banner ads to search marketing and social media. Lots of pixels have been spilled discussing how marketers can adapt to the new world order that the Internet has ushered in. But we have spent relatively little time noticing the changes in the rest of marketing.
Take a look at how the Internet is affecting Product, one of the neglected of the Four Ps. Have you noticed the trend to crowdsourcing? Check out Dell Inc. (Nasdaq: DELL)’s IdeaStorm, where thousands of suggestions for new and improved Dell computers are contributed for free by Dell customers.
Starbucks is trying the same thing, with its My Starbucks Idea.
And P&G researchers now source over one-third of their ideas from outside the company, many through Web collaborations with retired scientists.
What about the Internet's effect on Price? Sure, we all know that the Internet has lowered prices through efficient auctions (eBay) or better product selection and distribution (Amazon) or even reverse auctions (Priceline), but look deeper to see some of the other innovations that affect pricing. Did you ever expect to see an insurance company that displays the pricing of its competitors? Go to Progressive.com to see how it works.
You probably haven't thought that these changes affect B2B very much, but they do. Check out the e-marketplace for the global cement industry, and think about how that affects prices. If the cement industry has an e-marketplace, I bet yours does, too.
Which leads us to Place. Sure, the Internet itself is a new place to do marketing (and often sales), but we usually think of search marketing and e-commerce as old hat. Newer are the communities forming around industries, such as our global cement marketplace. And think about how Elance has transformed the way services are contracted for and received. None of these changes in distribution would have been possible before the Internet, and they drastically affect the way we think about marketing.
If you look even more closely, you'll see that the Internet is changing marketing in an even bigger way, not stopping at merely forcing marketers to rediscover other branches of marketing, but merging marketing with other disciplines, such as sales, public relations, and customer service.
Traditional marketing celebrated specialization, as each task was attacked with efficiency. The Internet, so far, is changing rapidly enough that we haven't yet figured out what to specialize in, what to be efficient in.
Many forms of Internet marketing are inherently more efficient than traditional marketing, so perhaps the real secret to Internet marketing is the flexibility to continue to push for new ways of getting things done.
Keep looking at your job more widely, to see how it intersects with your company's broader purpose, rather than narrowly to see how you can do the same old thing a little better. The Internet keeps breaking down silos between specialties, so don't find yourself trapped within yours.
— Mike Moran, author of Do It Wrong Quickly, is a speaker and consultant on Internet marketing.
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