The fifth P of marketing: or why you should reward your customers who check-in on your business place
Autor: rodrigottr | Publicado: 2011-10-26T23:31:00-07:00


Marketing theorists had said that the four important variables for targeting a market are Place, Product, Price and Promotion. The famous marketing mix. &nbsp;

Knowing the place where you put your business you can know what kind of person has an access to this place, if they are wealthy or not, for example. Knowing that you have a better idea of the price range your product can have. Also what kind of product it must be, high or low quality, for example. Knowing the product and price range you have a better idea on how to promote this product. Being it a high luxury item you may choose to promote it on a business magazine, being a simple product maybe newspaper could be a better idea. 

Internet is changing all this. And mobile Internet even more. 

Since you have Internet at anytime and anywhere just by caring your phone it doesn't matter anymore where your customer is. He can always be consuming your products. If he is at the WalMart looking for buying a computer he can also be looking through his phone how much is this computer on Ebay. Since he could be anywhere is also more difficult to target him your promotion through some old medias like an outdoor panel, for example. But also much easier through some other forms of media. Just like Mobile and Internet ads. This reality tends to evolve to another reality where place and promotion will matter each time less for marketing decision process. If your customer could be anywhere and reachable all the time by Internet the only variables that matter will be those intrinsically related to the act of creating offer. Just Product and Price. In the future all you gonna need is to create your product, put it on Internet and leave for Google to find your customers. In fact that is a reality already. And that takes us to another little thing.


The Gold of the next Age 

As we talked some time ago about powerful companies like Google or Facebook that have millions or billions of profiles inside their data centers that could easily influence the result of an election if using this information as base for marketing strategies for politicians. That is the gold of next age: DATA. That is what Google is seeking for. DATA. Or did you really believed they give you that beautiful Android OS for free because they practice the "don't be evil" philosophy?&nbsp; hahaha

Imagine all that researches that needs thousands of randomly selected people to answer questionnaires about what do they think about some politician or about some behavior, the time you wake up and what kinds of food you prefer. Those kinds of researches are incredibly expensive and hard to conduct. Some researches go meet the individuals directly and some other try sending on-line questionnaires boring as hell that makes you answer anything randomly just to get rid of them. That is how marketing research happens today. 


"Show me your phone and I'll say who you are"


But that is not how it works for Google or Facebook. Google and Facebook have so much information that they doesn't even need to create a random sample. They can have the population itself! They don't need to interview individuals. They can just pick the information from users accounts. They don't need ask you things and you can't lie to them. They can know exactly everything from you. Everything you do on your browser (and perhaps also outside), everything you have on your phone, is being observed and analyzed. Your entire identity is there. Gigabytes of information you don't even think you have. Of course they don't have a plan to fuck up with your life but they can use all that data for good and bad. In case of bad, to manipulate societies political processes on their own favor. And in case of good?


People. The fifth P of marketing


If you know the person, on an individual level, you don't need anymore your marketing strategy to be based over place, price, promotion and product. Simply you can find a consumer to any kind of product you make. Google could find them for you. Anywhere. Its the long tail. If Google have found even consumers for this bizarre products then there are consumers for everything. 

That amount of information that can link you to infinite demand could be even more raised if mobile operators start exploring the unbelievable amount of information that only them can provide. Such as location, presence, user profiles and platforms for applications; as well as device and network APIs&nbsp;&nbsp; There are more then 5.3 billion cellphones in the world. Trading and using all that information as products or services will surely be the future of marketing being reachable for great corporations but also for little business. In some way that we still can't imagine. 


You can start it now


Supposing that you have a local business, like a bar or pub, have read this article until now, and understand the importance of knowing your consumer, the fifth P of marketing. And understand that in the end the action of trading is the action of establishing relationships inside society. That it is all resumed by one single task: generating value for people. Then why not start it simply? Get to know them. 

Give your consumer a free Coke for each check-in they do on Foursquare and Facebook. Give your consumer a free Coke for they liking you on Facebook. Giving these little incentives to your consumers you get as a payback: 

- the profile of your consumer. 
- the publicity of your business inside their social medias. 
- the possibility of immediately attracting your consumer's friends to joining him on drinking some Coke 
- you build a direct and permanent relationship with him (through Facebook feeds)
- with Facebook feeds you can keep them up to date about your news, special promotions and events (like Brazil's soccer game :) 
- you can build a community around your business 
- through facebook your consumers can build friendships and relationships with themselves
- through facebook your consumers can discuss and give you permanent feedbacks 
- it all together, and being well managed, tends to improve and differentiate your business building a strong fidelity relationship with a community and your business

With all that and made for free with the help of Facebook and Foursquare you can collect lots of data about your consumers, get to know them better, build a permanent channel for listening them and improving your business and differentiate it more then if you hired an average business consultant. And for the symbolic price of a little single Coke per check-in.