The Evolution of Marketing – warranted or w*nk?

Mkt-evolution

Recently, more and more in fact, I am confronted by yet more marketing TLA’s, more ways to describe what we do and how to approach it and so I sit here and contemplate ‘marketing evolution’. Is it necessary or are we just marketing marketing?

The Era of the Ps

The classic 4Ps of marketing tell us: Product, Place, People and Price – it’s a classic… It is the DB5 of marketing. It was easy to understand and did all we needed right? Then came the 7Ps, it added the now standard additional Ps of: Promotion, Physical environment (bit of a push to call that just a ‘P’) and Process. We had started to slowly move into a more digital world, we needed process and physical environment because it was no longer just printed marketing we needed to cater for. All making sense so far right?

The B2 X Era

In the next leap of marketing evolution we focus on the ‘People’ P and start segmenting who we are and who we are targeting. Our audience are now no longer ‘people’ they are an audience group, they morphed into ‘Consumer’ or ‘Business’ and we started referring to ourselves as ‘Business’ too and actually, if you look closer, we are represented by the 1st ‘B’. Did we become more important than our customers and that is why we come 1st in this evolutionary step?

The Content Era

Promotion is the next P ‘Marketing’ decides needs re-branding and we are thrown into the ‘Content Era’. Content marketing pushes ever onwards into digital marketing and talks about ‘message amplification’ and ‘reach’. Print becomes a bit old-lady and the P of Physical environment grows-up from just the big 3 social media platforms; LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter to mobile marketing, marketing automation and programmatic buying. Our techniques have evolved in this era. We got our geek on!

The ABM Era

The most recent step has been into Account-based marketing. We combined the B2X era and the content era; segmented our People further and try and be even more targeted with content we hit them with; all under the watchful and judgemental eye of various analytics platforms!

The Next Era?

If you look at your business needs… What era fits you best? For my money, the Ps still does it for me.

It is simple and keeps the main focus on the P of people because at the end of the day we are people, selling to people, right? Yes we are more sophisticated about how we do it and how we measure success but let’s never forget what we are here to do… Reach the right PEOPLE with the right PRODUCT at the right PRICE and communicate all that in the PLACE they are most likely to absorb all our hard works and efforts.

Let’s not market marketing. It is simple and should remain so.

Thanks for listening! Would love to hear your thoughts?

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