Marketing Beyond the 4 P's

I have been thinking about this for a while – why are we talking about 4 P’s of Service management? Where is the ‘Customer’?

Tweeted this thought earlier today – but definitely felt 140 characters are too less to express the thought clearly.

So what are the 4Ps of service management as per ITIL?

Oh – well, ITIL V3 has two sets of Four P’s . 4 P’s of Service Strategy and 4P’s of Service management (or Service Design). I am not talking here about the Four P’s of Service strategy. (So if you look at different books of ITIL v3 and search for Four P’s you get different full forms and explanations. Be aware…)

The four Ps that we are talking about here are:  People, Process, Products and Partners. Earlier, we used to talk about P-P-T ( people process and technology) or 3 Ps, which got extended to 4 Ps – understanding the unavoidable and significance and need for managing our partners (external suppliers) as well.

Still, aren’t we missing the core of Service management : the ‘Customer’?

Are we leaving out a core aspect because it doesn’t start with a P? 
Ok then how about calling it Patron (starts with P!). Not bad, if we can call External Suppliers as Partners, then why don’t we call customers as ‘Patrons’?
So now, we have the Five P’s of Service management !
Why is this important?
I have a few thoughts on that:

• This will make the whole Service management centred on the key thing (where it should be) – the Customer!
• Managing (and taking care of) your customer is as important ( if not more!)as managing your People, Processes, Products and Partners. This is also justified by the importance of processes like Business relationship management and SLM
• Service Design (where ITIL is introducing the concept of Four Ps) should actually start with customer or should revolve around the central P – and make effective use of the other four Ps.
• Talking about Business- IT integration – what better way than make customer/business (Patron) as a core aspect of your Service management framework itself?

So will ITIL V3 Revision 2 (which I doubt) or Version 4 make the ‘Customer’ (or Patron – or any other word that start with P!) as the central P of the Service management? Hope so….
Your thoughts are welcome!

Marketing - Art or science?

I read a blog post the other day (unfortunately I didn't copy the URL and I don't remember which blog) where someone answered the good old marketing question being - "is marketing art or science". Let me tell you, I am so tired of that question. Let's just clear that question once and for all. I really don't see the point of asking it. Marketing is science and marketing is art. Why is that you might ask? Let me try to come up with some points of both sides:
Science:
Marketing is a science because marketing is about satisfying customers needs. To understand customer needs we need to develop scientific methods to learn about our customers and the needs they have. Also, the market and consumers generally behave in certain manners and deal with known variables. Porter's five forces is a good example of this. These five forces determine the profitability and behaviors within a market. The five forces being: competition within the industry, customers bargaining power, suppliers bargaining power, threat of entry of new competitors, threat of substitute products. These forces shape the strategy of the company.
Art:
Reading the points under science we might assume that marketing is all about science, but it is not. While we can predict behaviors of consumers and the market by using scientific methods, the decisions based on the scientific results are not always correct. Take Coca-Cola for example. They did extensive market research when developing a new product - a new coke. The majority of the participants in the research were very positive to the new coke. Management based their decision on these results and were sure of success when they launched the product. What happened? It was a disaster. People demanded the classic coke back. In fact, Coca-Cola had to relaunch the classic coke to the market because of the failure of the new coke. This shows that the science of marketing, even when being right within its terms it can be very wrong in terms of marketing.
So to conclude - marketing is both a science and art. This is why there are so big differences between marketers who succeed and those who do not succeed. On one side we have creative art directors trying to use their creative skills to do marketing - they usually fail because of being focused on creatively alone and not seeing the long-term picture. And then we have the scientific market researchers, who stand by their numbers and never make a decision without thoroughly going through all options. These people make safe decisions, but also wrong decisions because they are slow of making decisions - thus competitors can get the upper hand - and they fail to see the dynamics within the market and the arbitrary psychology of consumers.

Beyond the 4Ps: The 5Ts of Marketing Operations

CMOs of global companies are confronted with unparalleled challenges and opportunities. These include:
• Marketing Accountability: It is no secret that CEOs are demanding greater ROI on their marketing investments. Consequently many CMOs are driving initiatives to make the marketing function more accountable and measurable.
• Globalization: Serving global markets necessitates that marketing coordinate campaigns across continents to leverage cost and synchronize messaging, however campaigns must also meet local needs and norms.
• Complex Consumer Expectations: Consumers have become increasingly vigilant about SPAM, junk mail and privacy concerns. Regulatory compliance with each country and state is a mandate.

• Mergers and Acquisition (M&A) Integration: Frequent M&A places constant demands to rapidly integrate messaging, web, and collateral of newly acquired companies into the corporate brand. Inadequate marketing budgets frequently associated with acquisitions place additional stress on existing budget priorities.
• New Marketing Technology: The advent of new internet technology has enabled unprecedented interactive dialogs with customers. This presents a huge opportunity for forward-thinking companies to target and reach customers in personalized ways. However, new technologies must be implemented and integrated across the world with regional marketing teams that execute campaigns locally.
• Stakeholder Agreement: Coordination with regional marketing groups, product business units and sales constitutes a major task. Processes are needed to prioritize and support new product introductions and demand generation within marketing budget constraints. Terms, such as "What constitutes a qualified lead?" need to be standardized worldwide. If not addressed, roll-up, visibility and accountability into an actionable. CMO and campaign dashboards becomes nearly impossible.

Marketing Operations Emerges As A Discipline
Faced by these demands many CMOs have commissioned a marketing operations organization to tackle these challenges. Originally designated to create metrics and dashboards for accountability, leading companies are increasingly treating marketing operations as a key foundation to the marketing function.1
Marketing operations is the only function, (other than the busy CMO), that manages marketing from an end-to-end perspective. Marketing functions such as PR, product marketing and regional marketing only see a portion of the big picture.
"Marketing operations ensures marketing is run as a business," states a VP of Marketing Operations at a major Silicon Valley firm, "We strive to enable the marketing organization to be streamlined in day-to-day processes so they have time to think, focus on the customer and to innovate."2
The 5Ts of Marketing Operations

What constitutes marketing operations? Based on our work with clients, and in our research, we have found that marketing operations is an emerging dimension to the marketing mix. Enabled by new processes and technology, it goes beyond the 4Ps (i.e. Product, Price, Place, Promotion), and 3Cs (i.e. Customers, Competitors, Corporation3), to fully round out the marketing mix. The 5Ts of Marketing Operations are:
• Total Strategy
• Techniques & Processes
• Tracking & Predictive Modeling
• Technology
• Talent

By approaching marketing operations across these dimensions, CMOs have an integrated approach to enable marketing worldwide. Let's describe the 5Ts in more detail:
Total Strategy: This area involves strategy development in the product portfolio. It is not uncommon for large companies to have seventy-five or more products in their portfolios -- some have hundreds. Managing investments and priorities across the portfolio is paramount.
• What constitutes effective strategy development for each product?
• What are the key elements needed in each plan to win in the market-place and to roll this out worldwide?
• Where do we "double-down" our investment? How do we gain market-share with our resources? Where do we reduce investment?
• Does the organization reflect how our business should optimally interact with customers? Are there new ways we can improve our dialog and reach?
• Chief of staff for the CMO: Based on our work with clients and research, the head of marketing operations in a number of companies takes on this role - driving the organizational agenda, identifying "white spaces", and ensuring measurement results are discussed at review meetings.
Techniques & Processes: How should information flow most effectively across the marketing organization worldwide? How do we make decisions? What are our governance processes? What is our roadmap for marketing processes next year? in 3 years?
• Fiscal planning processes and reviews.
• How should budgets be allocated?
• How should we optimally interact with our customers? What are the touch points?
• How should information flow within marketing and with other stakeholders such as sales and business units?
• Standards and criteria for evaluating new initiatives and campaigns.
• What are product launch categories (e.g. Criteria for "A", "B", or "C" launches)
• Can we apply six-sigma to our processes?
Tracking and Predictive Modeling: How do we make marketing more accountable? How do we measure campaigns and ensure better predictability of outcomes?
• How are we doing today? Metrics and dashboards
• Forecasting - What are leading indicators of the future? How can we better target and predict? e.g. data mining customer databases.
Technology: How do we implement technology across the globe to enable effective customer dialog, demand generation and measurement? What are the business requirements for IT? How does technology support the marketing and sales process roadmap for the next 3 years? How do we integrate with sales technology?
• Internet/Web/e-commerce
• Consolidating/Rationalizing Customer Databases
• Online Customer Forums
• Marketing Resource Management Software
• Analytics/Decision making software
• Marketing Research Databases etc.
Talent: How do we ensure our marketing personnel are trained and able to work with new marketing technologies and processes? How can we enable them to make the right decisions based on analytics and campaign scorecards?
• What are the roles and responsibilities of each talent community?
• How do these communities interact? Where are the hand-offs?
• Training strategy with a marketing skills curriculum across the marketing function
• Ensuring balancing between the art and science of marketing

The 5Ts Transform the Future of Marketing

Although they seem foundational; the 5Ts have a deep and significant impact on customer relationships. For example, by implementing integrated technology for demand generation and customer database access, regional marketing personnel can now build innovative campaigns on top of a marketing operations infrastructure. By tracking the success of a campaign, companies will realize better customer targeting and ROI; they learn from prior successes and failures.

Although it can be a multi-year process for large organizations to implement all of the 5Ts, a holistic, integrated approach to marketing operations gains CMOs greater accountability and ROI for their organizations worldwide. It enables them to "run marketing as a business."

The 5Ts add a critical foundation to the marketing function enabling marketing operations to support CMOs in tackling contemporary challenges and opportunities. It is dramatically transforming the marketing function and is changing how marketing will be conducted in the future. 

By

Adrian Carol Ott