Solutions Marketing: The four P's are OVER

Virtually every marketing student on the planet can recite the 4 P’s: Product, Price, Place and Promotion. Since the early 1960's when Harvard Business School professor Neil Borden first described them as key elements of the marketing mix, the 4 P's have held their ground as the foundational pillars of 50 years of marketing planning.

In today’s B2B world, however, when more and more business buyers are looking for integrated solutions instead of simple products, a great many marketers are questioning whether they are still relevant and appropriate. Do the the 4 P's still provide a useful framework for responding to a market opportunity? Can marketers focused on highly intangible, complex offerings still fall back on Dr. Borden's formula?

The short answer is "No." Indeed, it's time to declare the 4 P's  OVER for solutions marketing. Let's stick a fork in them, declare them too product-centric, and move on. If you're marketing toothpaste, the 4 P's are still relevant, although the rise of social media definitely raises some serious questions about Promotion, and several other P's as well. But if you're marketing cloud-based enterprise management or commercial real estate development solutions, OVER is a whole lot more useful: Offer, Value, Experience, and Relationships.

Compared to the 4 P's, OVER is rooted in the understanding that marketing solutions is quite different than marketing products, and that marketing solutions in a digital, buyer-driven world requires very different thinking, tools, and metrics.

The chart below compares the two approaches.

Talk with anyone who has spent significant time marketing both products and solutions. They’ll tell you that there are very important differences. And when you net it out, the most important difference is understanding that the classic 4 P’s of marketing are now OVER.

I'll dig more deeply into the four elements of OVER over the next several months. In the meantime, we'd love to know what you think. Are you still using the four P's? Does OVER work for you? What are we missing?