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Enhance the 4Ps of Marketing by Adding a 5th P to Your Marketing Mix

The 4P’s of marketing has been the essential marketing mix for many decades.

The traditional 4Ps of marketing are:

  1. Price
  2. Product
  3. Promotion
  4. Place

However, marketing has changed and developed into a more sales led and focused discipline. You can no longer accurately market to your product without knowing your customer. This is why we need to develop and enhance our traditional marketing mix.

Marketing mix and the 4P’s traditionally is putting the right product in the right place, at the right price and promoting it at the right time. Here at Alacrity, we like to use a 5P’s of marketing approach, and the 5th ‘P’ is Persona.

Next week we will be sharing our processes for building a Persona with some examples and templates that you can use. In advance of that though, we need to identify why personas are the answer to supercharge your 4P’s of marketing mix!

Using the 5P’s of marketing approach we can target each of the existing 4Ps using a customer persona or combination of Personas.

This marketing mix helps ensure that ‘putting the right product in the right place,…’ happens. Using this method we can understand what the product or service can offer.

The 5Ps of marketing are:

  1. Price
  2. Product
  3. Promotion
  4. Place
  5. Persona

Product

The product meets customers needs or demands. It is critical to understand the problems that your product solves. The benefits offered by your product as well as its features need to be recognized by the customer.

The unique selling proposition (USP) of the product need to be identified and leveraged through marketing. By building a Persona, we can also identify and understand our potential buyers and how we can market the product to them.

Price

Price covers what the end user should be expected to pay for your product. How a product is priced will affect how well it sells. In marketing, your research should lead to a perceived value of the product instead of an actual cost. If a product is above or below its perceived value, then it will struggle to sell.

It is vital to understand how a customer sees what you are selling through building a Persona. If there is positive customer value, then your product may be (successfully) priced higher than its objective monetary value. Alternatively, if your product in the eyes of the consumer has little value, then it may need to be cheaper.

Price may also be affected by your delivery plans. Consider your delivery chain markup and how your competitors are priced.

Promotion

Marketing communication all falls under promotion within this marketing mix. Promotions could include special offers or advertising campaigns. Whatever the channel you decide to use, it needs to be suitable for your product, the price and of course the end user.

Differentiating between marketing and promotion is necessary as promotion is just your communication method. Using your ideal buyer persona, you can see how this promotion may be visible to them. If your typical users are very social media led then you will need to explore promotion through different platforms.

Another thing to identify through a persona is whether your customer persona is aware they need your product. If you have a new disruptive technology that hasn’t been visible before then paying for AdWords may be fruitless as no-one could be searching for it. It’s better to identify what your Persona is seeking and what their pain points are. Then promote your product through a targetted content marketing mix addressing that pain point with your solution.

Place

Place or its placement is how the product is provided to your customer. Distribution is a crucial element of placement. A placement strategy will help evaluate what channel is most suited to your product. How the end user is introduced to your product also needs to complement the rest of your product strategy.

If you have a SaaS product, then you know by identifying your Persona that they will need to come directly to your website (or through partner sites). Using your Persona, you can locate their journey through to your website and address any pinch points. Using promotion to target your Persona to visit your website is crucial for a SaaS product. Here’s where content marketing and a digital acquisition strategy is most important.

Persona

As mentioned, the Persona pulls together Product, Price, Promotion and Place within the marketing mix. A persona makes each of the traditional 4P’s of marketing meaningful. Expected outcomes can be anticipated and planned for in advance.

Conclusion

Identifying a Persona will enhance your marketing mix and build 3-dimensionally above the 4P’s of marketing. The Persona will represent your ideal customer, and you must base them on market research and real data. Otherwise, you are basing your Persona solely on assumptions which could be wrong. If your Persona isn’t realistic then when you apply the Persona to your product, price, promotion or place, the outcomes will be unexpected and wrong costing time and money.

Next week we’ll be exploring how to build a customer persona with some examples for you to take away. So, watch this space!

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