The discipline of brand marketing was created in the 1950s by consumer package goods companies like Procter & Gamble as a way to differentiate their products from their competitors with very similar offerings. Think about the recent example from Mad Men — Ketchup was created by Heinz to stand out versus all of the competitors’ catsups. Like most brand marketing, the product was essentially the same from one manufacturer to the other, but the marketing and the point of difference (commonly referred to today as the brand’s value proposition) was what made the branded product stand out and it served as a platform for all the marketing that surrounds that product.
This brand value helped consumers justify a higher price for a higher-quality product, or at least one that was perceived to be better through the creation of clever advertising. Brands like Tide became household names and the gold standard when it came to getting your clothes clean. And today, many would argue that Tide is still a must-have in the laundry room, showcasing the success of strategic, evolving and cohesive brand management for the past 60 years.
The 4 Ps of Marketing in the Digital Age
When you take a marketing class in college, you are taught a basic framework to think about how to most effectively market a product: the “four Ps.” The four Ps include: product, pricing, promotion and placement. Each of these Ps, or levers, can and should be used in conjunction with one another to create the most effective marketing mix, ultimately, resulting in sales and profit growth. But given that so much of marketing has moved online, how do we effectively use these four Ps in the new digital marketing age?

Product
Historically, products could be touched, looked at with the naked eye, even smelled in-store to determine its true quality and value. According to the Census Bureau of the Department of