A New Marketing

(This post is part of my “Must Reads” section.)

Every marketer has heard of the four P’s - product, price, place and promotion. They’re the foundation of many marketing educations and the cornerstones of many marketer’s practices.

Recently, however, a new marketing mix has begun to emerge, no longer based on the four P’s. This New Marketing Mix is based on the four C’s - create, connect, correct and cancel.

Create - as in create something remarkable (see A Purple Cow). This is the basis of The New Marketing Mix. Gone are the days where you can just create a product and then spend all your money convincing people to care about it. In today’s marketplace, where information flows fast and free, it’s vital to put all your effort into creating something that people truly believe is worthwhile. If you can get them to care about it, then you’ve really accomplished something.

Connect - as in make it possible for you to connect with your customers and for your customers to connect with each other. This kind of connection is vital to the growth and success of any person/product/company/service. Start a blog, make a MySpace page, set up a message board, put together a monthly news letter, add a suggestion box to your website. Find out what people like and what they don’t like. All this connection creates a community, where the whole is always more than the sum of it’s parts.

Change - as in if it’s not working…change it. Test and measure over and over again. The solution is never to plow more money into it and wait for people to “catch on”. Why waste time and money on something that is not doing what it’s supposed to? Use analytics to test the success of your ad campaigns or landing pages. Measure the results, tweak it, and measure again… and then tweak it again, etc. In New Marketing, not only is there constant room for improvement, there is a need for it. Just because the ad is up or the copy done, doesn’t mean it’s set in stone.

Cancel - as in get rid of it. If you’ve tried to fix something, but it’s still not working - then stop doing it. Don’t be afraid to give an under performing ad/product/service/page the axe. With so many other, positive things you could find to spend your time and money on, why keep the lukewarm stuff in play? As the old poker saying goes: You have to know when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em.