The Marketing Mindset: How to Engage Yours

Strategic marketing is at once a business philosophy and a practical discipline of management pervading every function of the organization with a focus on the customer and the world in which they live. It requires clear understanding and articulation of the past and present as well as a forecast of what might happen in the future.

Strategic marketing is characteristically “outside-in,” meaning that your attention originates with the customer, not the organization, ultimately helping you to create products, services, and experiences to ensure an ongoing, satisfying relationship between the two.

For decades, the four Ps—product, price, place, and promotion—have served as the framework for effective marketing management. The blend of these four variables resulted in a marketing mix to form the basis of an organization’s marketing initiatives. The four Ps are:

Product: products and services an organization produces and sells (because it can);

Price: the amount charged (to cover costs and make profit);

Place: where the organization distributes products or services (because they are the easiest and cheapest places to do so); and

Promotion: what the organization says about the product or service (to the masses whenever, wherever, and however they want).

This framework evolved some 40 years ago, in an age of consumerism characterized by caveat emptor—let the buyer beware.

Today, organizations need to adopt the four Cs—customer, cost, convenience, and communication—in framing strategic marketing initiatives to achieve organizational objectives. Coined by Robert F. Lauterborn, co-author of The New Marketing Paradigm: Integrated Marketing Communications (NTC Business Books, 1997), the four Cs encourage us to operate our organizations from the customer’s perspective. Lauterborn advises the following: