A long time ago, the 1960’s to be exact, a marketer by the name of E. Jerome McCarthy came up with what was a revolutionary way to describe “Marketing” called the “4-Ps Classification. The four P’s stood for Product, Price, Promotion, and Place. It was revolutionary thinking at the time and was a cornerstone of marketing for many decades.
But this was in a time (not now) when marketing was “all about the company” and was focused on how much “promotion” could thy produce and shove at us, the customer. It was basically a one-way street and it focused on the concept of “interruption marketing,” meaning if we continually interrupted you maybe you would remember and buy our product. The entire ad agency world as we know it was built on this one concept, if I can interrupt you wherever you are, you will buy from us. This meant TV, radio, newspaper, magazines, billboards, and a host of other sources.
This model is dead. And the one element that was always missing from this model was the NEW “P” word, PASSION. There was no accounting for the passion of the customer; it was all about the passion of the company. What is it they wanted to sell you? They were plenty passionate about their product or service…but were you, the customer passionate. I think not.
Today, if you aren’t dialed into the “Passion” of your customer audience, they won’t be dialed into you. With all the ways customers can find products and services and see who treats them the best, if you aren’t figuring this out, you will be gone, just like the traditional media model. And not only do we need to dial into the customers passion, we need to find the communities where they are passionate as well. If we can help these communities then the new customer will have a passion for us.
The model is reversed. Provide what will help your passionate audience and they will help you in return by interacting with you and purchasing your products and services. Push your passion on your customer audience and they will scatter faster than you can imagine. So replace the 4 P’s with the Passion “P” for and you will do more to help your company by just using one “P” than you will by using all 4 of the other “P’s.”
