I have always said that Business is marketing.

Most people think Marketing to be sales or sales promotion. I have even heard people in conferences referring to ‘marketing’ as something that door to door sales people do- or MLM.

To top that, I meet many people from Public Relations, Creative services, media planning and buying and Digital marketing- who think meaningful marketing is only related to their business.

It is quite clear, after a brief discussion, that if they are individually tasked at making a marketing strategy, things would not exactly be hunky dory.

Actually, Marketing is all that and more. Here is a refresher on some important elements in marketing thery- an impromptu post. Remember these are not the only elements. Neither are they by themselves ‘Marketing strategy’ themselves. But these are the cornerstones of Marketing and establish marketing as the center stage to doing business:

The 4P’s of marketing- Widely attributed to Philp Kotler, actually the concept of a ‘marketing mix’ actually developed in the 1940s in the US. Later, the 4Ps were introduced as elements of the marketing mix- by a Canadian marketing thought leader- McCarthy (Can’t recall the full name- my bad)- in the 1960s.

The 4Ps are the ‘controllable variables’ to marketing- things that a marketer can control. They are- Product, Place, Promotion and Price. Actually just by themselves, these elements could define business. Without these, what is business?

This mix was later extended to the 7 Ps of marketing. The alibi was that the 4 Ps are too ‘Product’ centric. How about businesses with service? So about 2 decades later- in the 1980s- came the 3 extra Ps- denoting People, Process and Physical Evidence. The 7Ps together are also called the ‘Service Mix’.

Later, apart from the 4Ps and the 7Ps; the 5Is began to be touted as the right thing for the information age.

The 5Is are:

• Identification: Who are your customers?
• Individualization: (think Amazon)
• Interaction: Dialogue
• Integration: To me this has multiple meanings- from integrating customer knowledge to various parts of the company, to integrating learnings from various digital assets, to integrating marketing plans and processes
• Integrity: Develop trust and transparency (cornerstones of social media marketing)

All the approaches establish a really cool mnemonic for Digital marketing set up, though the 5Is really represent Digital Marketing well. As a matter of fact, it is quite clear that these approaches work hand in hand. They are are not about one against another- just extensions and supplements of each other.

As you could imagine, the 5Is define the process and the 7Ps are essentially controllable variables.

Business is marketing.

More later.

Till then- Think about it

Shalabh