Forget the 4 Ps of Marketing; Think the 3 Cs of Social Business

How can a traditional marketing culture cope in the new social world of business?  It can't.

Classical marketing, still taught at most business schools, misses the point.  The 4 Ps that have defined marketing activity for so long - Product, Price, Place, Promotion - work when companies and customers participate in binary communications: company to customers, customer to company.  But in a multi-channel world, inbound and outbound conversations exist for everyone, at any time, to anyone.

The 3 Cs of Social Business: Content, Customer, Channel

Social media is about engagement and relationships, two inherently unmanageable activities.  Product, price, place and promotion might drive short-term results, but long-term relationships evolve from communities of interest, from respectful discussions, and from connections that cross and take unexpected paths.  Those relationships create self-regenerating marketing engines, whether the core business is B2B, B2C or B2B2C.  The basic building blocks are no longer the 4 Ps of marketing, but the 3 Cs of social business.

Content - is both the message and the words, pictures, sounds and context that convey your message.  In a social relationship, content is the driver of engagement and often involves multiple messages, messages that get passed along (remember the old game of telephone?), and messages that are either much shorter or much longer than the traditional marketing message.  Your content imparts not only information, but also the culture of your organization.  As in any relationship, the customer needs to like you, or at least respect you, before engaging.  Consistency in messaging over time and across business units and corporate silos is critical and impossible to manage.  Content creation expands way beyond the old world Marketing Department. 

Customer - Who is your target customer???  The holy grail of marketing used to be to identify your target customer segments, then align the 4 Ps around them.  But customers have become peripatetic; they roam from one community of interest to another - both personal and professional; they surf blogs and tweets and Facebook posts and YouTube; they share what they find interesting with individuals outside your target segments.  And then one of these people you hadn't targeted is suddenly a fan and pushing you into segments even further afield from your "target."  In The Domino Project (see http://bit.ly/pEu1ta), Seth Godin suggests that publishers stop publishing books with a target audience in mind, "...the glory days of publishing to fill a niche are gone...The new frontier is to publish books that spread."  Today, Marketing needs to let customers declare themselves first, then service those customers as effectively as possible.

Channel - Social media channels present a spaghetti web of connections.  While advanced analytics are enabling more personalization, serving up ads for instance only to individuals who meet certain criteria, social media can also make it more difficult to engage.  In the old B2B world, for example, personal knowledge of customers was a sales role, not a marketing perspective.   Yet, effective use of social media channels requires knowing your customers.  Where do they hang out on-line?  In what social media communities?  What Twitter hashtags do they follow?  How do you humanize your organization to become part of the customer's personal network?  Does your culture mesh with your customer's personal and professional cultures?  Where you socialize is itself a message and a determinant of the customers likely to find you.  Who within your organization can comfortably participate in these communities?

The 3 Cs of Social Media reflect the basic change demanded of Marketing and the role of Marketing in your organization.

How is your Marketing Department changing?  Does it still exist?