Are the 4 Ps Still Relevant?
“The 4 Ps don’t mean anything anymore when it comes to creating a business model,” Paul Greenberg, president of The 56 Group and author of CRM at the Speed of Light, said during his keynote at the recent Gartner CRM Summit. He cited Threadless T-shirts (threadless.com) as an example: People submit T-shirt designs, site visitors vote on them, the winners go on sales on the site.
“We no longer live in the business ecosystem, we live in a customer ecosystem,” Greenberg said. “So you have to provide value and values to customers.”
The trick is that each customer wants a personalized experience regardless of their value to you. Companies have to figure out how to do this with millions of customers. Some are giving them the tools to own/run their own customer experience.
According to Greenberg, key differentiators are no longer products and services; today’s key differentiator is the customer experience. “The partnership you have with customers creates value for both you and your customers. Cocreation of value is essential today,” he said. “The lines between consumer and producer are blurred.”
Customers today want to participate in making your business work. They’re not passive; they want to be an active participant in a community and will talk about the experience – good or bad – and you have no control of that, he said.
Greenberg said companies need to pay special attend to Generation C, which according to Springwise, is the cross-generational group of people who are focused on content, connection, and being creative—regardless of their age.
The new business model, according to Greenberg, is one in which users have the tools to configure and customize their personal experience with the product (like gamers do), where corporate culture is defined by the voice of the customers, and where organizations deliver value in ways appropriate to their customers. “The goal is to create advocates,” he said. “Revenue and profit increase accordingly.”
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