wmt_heart copy1When I was studying marketing in college, the 4 P’s of marketing that I learned from my expensive, heavy old-school textbooks were: Product, Place, Promotion and Price. Savvy marketers today pee on those dated P’s!

In this post, I breakdown the old P’s of marketing and shed light on my take on the new P’s – let’s get you to marketing breakthroughs!

Product is Now Passion:
Companies don’t only sell products, they also sell services. Some companies sell products and services. No matter what you sell, know that today, consumers support passion over product. Passion is contagious. It is what creates a viral impact and keeps customers loyal.

Place is Now Presence: In the old days, companies needed a great location for visibility. Today, we don’t need a place (I live this, my company has been 100% virtual for over a decade), we need a strong presence. A powerful presence is a healthy mix of web, social, personal branding, PR, email, and search. A powerful presence puts place in its place.

Promotion is Now Pedagogy: While big, expensive ads used to rule, getting on the top of a mountain and screaming your brand’s name isn’t effective marketing anymore…it’s just noise. And in a wild web world ridden with noise, the only way to cut through the clutter is to replace promotion with pedagogy. The method and practice of teaching is what connects consumers to companies. I am a markeding® (marketing via education) evangelist. Respect is reciprocal. When we educate our target market(s), we empower them and when people are empowered, they feel more powerful to buy what we are selling.

Price is Now People: Competing with price is dated. Come on, are people wearing Gucci and driving Jaguars because they are a steal? Get real. It’s people over price. People choose who and what they support based on the way that they feel – what feels right, what makes them feel right and what humans are searching for at our core is connection and that connection with consumers begins by being a person. Some brands are business to business (B2B) and some are business to consumer (B2C), but what makes companies profit is humanizing their brand, operating with a people to people (P2P) approach. If you want to be big in business, you have to be human…humanize your business by focusing on connecting with the people you are passionate about serving.

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Tweet: Today’s 4 P’s are driven by digital marketing: Passion, Presence, Pedagogy and People. http://bit.ly/1X8XxzG