Recently, my son’s high school marketing teacher mentioned the 5 P’s of marketing. All I could think was “Wait—5 P’s? Isn’t the marketing mix supposed to be 4 P’s:  price, product, promotion, and place? What is this new 5th P all about?”

When I asked his teacher that very question, she explained the new 5th P stood for “people.” As soon as she said that, I had a light-bulb moment. Of course the new P stood for people—there was nothing in the original marketing mix that addressed the target market!

So, what does a responsible marketer do when confronted by a new P?  She heads straight to Google for some answers.

The Many Different Ps

My first order of business was to find out if this 5th P was officially part of the new marketing mix. My research yielded inconclusive, yet insightful results. There seemed to be no clear consensus on an official induction of a new 5th P.

In 2013, one marketing expert interviewed by Forbes wrote how the 5th P was actually customer experience. I’m not sure how she took that alphabetical leap—but it does make sense to include customer experience in today’s marketing world (although, arguably, this could fit into the people category).

I also found this Entrepreneur article that stated the 4 P’s changed to 7 P’s back in 2004. (Who knew?) According to the article, the new marketing mix consists of the original 4 P’s as well as packaging, positioning, and people.

While packaging and positioning make powerful additives to the marketing mix, people, in my book, is the most important new addition. People are at the heart of any marketing effort—whether it’s your target market or having the very best marketing team to deliver the experiences your customers are looking for.

If you’re ready to add more experienced people to your marketing team, let us know. We can help you find the right talent who will know how and when to leverage each part of the marketing mix—no matter how many P’s you subscribe to.

 

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2 Comments

  1. Dana July 12, 2016 at 8:30 am - Reply

    Great article! As you said, “Who knew?”

  2. Mary Foltz July 13, 2016 at 2:08 pm - Reply

    Enjoyed your blog! Indulge me for a humorous trip down memory lane… When I joined Nextel in 1997, I remember asking “who are our customers and how do we segment the market for the push to talk service?” PTT was Nextel’s differentiator on the cellphone. I expected industry or job function, or maybe even demographic. It made sense to leverage the voice products segmentation for my mobile data apps, and I hoped it would save me time. Imagine my surprise at the answer: “sure, our customer segments are blue, white and grey.” Whaasa? Collar. Eh? Blue collar workers, white collar workers, and, we don’t know but it seems a type of hybrid worker is emerging.
    They were right! And with a hot feature to serve that market, the company grew fast. But I needed a clearer focus, So I did the full segmentation work to figure out which industries and job functions we should target. It was fun. And it worked out. So well that Nextel started the whole mobile data applications marketplace, we take for granted now.
    The point of my story is if you keep People in your viewfinder from the start, youll get a lot closer to your actual customer than ‘grey’ and have a better chance of building something great.

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