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Why Do B-Schools Still Teach The Famed 4P's Of Marketing, When Three Are Dead?
- kstenerud 15y agoBecause those three are not dead. Promotion is required when your competitive advantage is not great enough to beat out the competition on product alone. Zara's advantage is their short time to market, which allows them to respond to consumers faster, and an infrastructure that allows low prices with acceptable margins. Google has a huge competitive advantage in their rise to ubiquity in what was then an immature market. Such is not, however, the norm. You see a lot of this in the online space simply because it hasn't been saturated yet. That will change, just like it did with general stores in the Old West. Place? Well the place is online. But it's more than that; place is discoverability. A URL is a place just as much as a downtown brick-and-mortar location is a place. It's about how easy and convenient it is for the customer to GET to your wares, and in the case of a URL it's all about ease-of-remembering. Also, people in many non-US countries don't even remember URLs. They use gateway homepages that direct them where they want to go. Getting placement on that page is paramount to online success. I expect we'll see a lot more of this even in the US as content curation becomes the norm. Price? Price is, and always has been, a major factor. Price sets customer expectation. High price implies quality, which attracts a certain class of customer. Low price? Well those aggregator sites are also frequented by a certain market segment. If your product falls within that segment as well, you must compete based on low prices. So yes, the 4 P's are alive and kicking, and will be for the foreseeable future.