Marketing 101: The Four Ps for Web 2.0

You may remember back in May when I talked about the four Ps of marketing. Well, when those guidelines were developed, they were designed to address a conventional marketing perspective. They were meant to address a marketing situation where you had a physical good or some sort of service, and you were attempting to market it in a conventional kind of way. For example, your product could be a bar of soap, accident attorney services, or a hot new music player.

However, some people have said that these four Ps — Product, Pricing, Promotion, and Placement — are not adequate to account for all the factors that take place with Web 2.0. Blogs, social media, and other websites exist under an entirely different framework than a brick-and-mortar store. For example, a competition between blogs can very easily be mutually advantageous. Both blogs can gain RSS readers without taking away any subscribers from one another.

The Web 2.0 Four Ps are:

Personalization: Web 2.0 users are less interested in products that are just “off the shelf.” They want solutions that are fully catered to their specific needs. A great example of this are built-to-order computers, like those offered by Dell. Instead of walking into a store and being offered a pre-selected configuration, a user can pick and choose the individual components. The iGoogle personalized homepage works much the same way.

Participation: No longer restricted to passive consumption, Web 2.0 allows consumers to fully participate in the development of a brand, what it offers, and what it stands for. The BlueFur blog, for example, provides an open forum where users can make specific requests for what BlueFur should offer and how the web hosting service should be run.

Peer-to-Peer: Also known as Social Computing, the P2P phenomenon pushes customer participation even further. There is definitely a push toward collaboration with the consumer. Group programming projects are a good example of this.

Predictive Modeling: Wikipedia defines this as referring to “predictive algorithms, such as neural network, that are being successfully applied in marketing problems (both a regression as well as a classification problem).”

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