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The Traditional Four Ps of Marketing
I graduated from engineering school back in the 1960s (no, I wasn’t a prodigy; I’m just that old). When I speak about the experience I like to joke that it was easier then because we only had four elements to worry about: earth, air, fire and water. It seems that I can say pretty much the same thing about attending graduate business school in the 1980s: we only needed four Ps to define the nature of marketing. Product, Place, Price and Promotion were variables in the classical marketing mix; these have proliferated in recent years to include Packaging, Positioning and People. “Packaging” has apparently broken free from “Product” and “Positioning” is no longer has a happy home within “Promotion”. I have no idea where “People” came from, unless that’s what we used to call sales force and customer service in a less feely-touchy era.

A Proliferation of Ps
Before we start dragging “Preening” or “Posturing” into the mix, I’d like to suggest that we forget about this focus on P-words and acknowledge that digital technologies and the emergence of social media have made this parsing of the marketing mix largely outdated (did I just drop another p-word?). The old marketing models were based on the assumption that each element in the mix could be independently controlled, which then was largely true. Today, attempting to isolate any of these as an independent variable is increasingly difficult, and rapidly becoming counterproductive.

Reactive Marketing vs. Predictive Marketing
The classical marketing model was predictive in nature. What features should the product have? How many units should be manufactured? How will it be distributed and sold? What price point will deliver the most profit? These were the kinds of questions that moved marketing to the C-suite in the last half of the 20^th century. In the 21^st century, however, “predictive” is being replaced by another word–“reactive”–and the Ps are on their way out.

The element of place began its decline 20 years ago with the creation of amazon.com as an online bookstore, and continued as online booking transformed the airline and the travel industries soon after that. Price was the next casualty, as the ability to adjust price against demand in real time became practical. The costs quoted online for an airline ticket or a hot product today only stay good until the ruling algorithm decides to raise or lower it based on sales and availability. Advances such as 3D printing that facilitate individual customization will soon be challenging the traditional concept of product. One of the more recent Ps–packaging–is losing its relevance as the consumer-product interface moves from shelves to an on-screen image of the product and a corrugated cardboard box delivered by UPS or the Postal Service.

And then there’s Promotion, with its offspring Positioning.

The Web and Brand Evolution
Back in the 1990s everyone was questioning how the Internet would affect the concept of brand. Specifically, how would broader access to product information comparative data, and third-party reviews change consumer behavior? That was Web 1.0, of course; the arrival of Web 2.0 and social networks muddied the waters even further. The answer is that brands have had to become less monolithic and more personal, relying on the establishment of individual relationships rather than one-sided mass messaging. In classical marketing, brand identity was built by controlling much of what the public saw or heard regarding a product or a company. Digital media and social networks have made that level of control impossible to maintain. “Brand” is no longer about image; it is about experience. Promotion and Positioning are part of the brand experience, but they don’t define it. They become integrated with all the other Ps in a kind of holistic product gestalt that defies partitioning. Of course, without partitioning things like ROI become hard to evaluate.

Time to Stop Minding the Ps, and Start Minding the Qs?
“Q” is another letter that was developing some traction when I was studying marketing. Q ratings (aka Q factors) related directly to how well the population regarded brands, television programs, celebrities and pretty much anything else in the public eye. The formula was simple: survey a statistically valid sample of the population and have them rank the subject on a scale of familiarity and preference; divide by the number of people sampled and you had a Q Score. I doubt if anyone ever tried to link Q ratings to ROI, but it certainly provides a snapshot of how well the brand experience is stacking up in the eyes of the public. As the business environment grows less involved with predicting what will happen in favor of reacting to what is actually happening, a top-down perspective on brand, such as the Q score, may be the most relevant measure of marketing success.

It’s All About the Brand Experience
When Theodore Levitt published his landmark paper, Marketing Myopia, he challenged corporations to become aware to look beyond what they were doing and focus on the value they were actually in the business of providing (e.g., you may be manufacturing drills, but your business is providing ways to make holes). Similarly, it’s time for CMOs, marketing consultants and advertising agencies to stop thinking about marketing as a series of discrete responsibilities and disciplines, and instead adopt a single-minded focus on managing the brand experience. The Ps of classical marketing are no longer just interrelated, but are interwoven contributors to a brand experience that is greater than its individual parts. In fact, it doesn’t matter how many Ps you put into the equation, none of them act as independent variables. The resulting brand experience is all that is important. And it can change from day to day.