↓ Listen to this edition right here. Hit play below! (Yes, this is me. Not AI.) Audio Length | 5 min 34 sec

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Marketing without strategy is like building a house without blueprints.

The marketing mix has been evolving for more than 70 years. In the years following World War II, marketers began looking for a more systematic way to think about the growing number of decisions involved in bringing products to market. By the 1960s, that thinking had been distilled into the familiar 4 Ps: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion.

Then the economy changed.

As service businesses grew more important, marketers recognized that the original four Ps didn’t fully account for businesses where the experience itself is part of what customers buy.

In the early 1980s, the model expanded to include People, Process, and Physical Evidence, and the 4 Ps became 7. Around the same time, Al Ries and Jack Trout made the case for Positioning in their 1981 book, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind.

Before I explain why Positioning matters most, here’s a quick refresher on the seven Ps of the marketing mix.

• Product is the complete value you deliver, not just the item or service itself.
• Price is what you charge and the signal it sends about your quality.
• Place is where and how customers find and buy from you.
• Promotion is how people hear about you, from advertising and content to networking and PR.
• People are everyone who delivers the experience, from employees to contractors to leadership.
• Process is how the work actually gets done, from becoming a customer to how you handle problems.
• Physical Evidence is the tangible proof customers use to judge an intangible service, such as your website, proposals, and brand identity.

Here’s the thing: positioning is actually the foundation

If marketing without strategy is like building a house without blueprints, then I think marketing without positioning is like building a house without a foundation; it’s destined to collapse.

Positioning is the place your business occupies in the customer’s mind relative to the alternatives. I think of it differently from the other seven Ps. It isn’t simply an eighth P on the list. It’s the foundation that makes the other seven coherent.

Your positioning helps determine what your product should be, and what it shouldn’t be. It influences what you can charge, where and how you sell, how you promote yourself, the people you need, the experience you create, and the evidence customers use to decide whether your promise is credible. Without clear positioning, those decisions can easily become disconnected.

That brings me to something I see all the time. When businesses say they have a “marketing problem,” they often mean they think they need to promote themselves more. But Promotion is only one of the Ps in the Marketing mix.

If the positioning isn’t clear, the product isn’t quite right, the pricing sends the wrong signal, the customer experience doesn’t match the promise, or the process creates friction, more promotion doesn’t solve the problem. It just exposes it to more people.

This is why I think of brand strategy as a system of interconnected decisions. Your positioning influences your pricing, and your pricing creates expectations. Your people and process shape the experience, your physical evidence reinforces or contradicts the promise, and promotion tells people what to expect.

When those decisions reinforce one another, the business feels coherent. When they don’t, no amount of marketing activity creates alignment.

So before asking, “What should we do for marketing?” try a different question: “Which of the Ps is actually causing the problem?”

You may realize you don’t need another campaign. You may need clarity about what you’re selling, who it’s for, what it should cost, how it should be experienced, or how you should be positioned.

Then you can decide how to promote it.

Most businesses don’t lack marketing effort; they lack alignment.

If you’d like to go deeper on how each of the eight Ps works, I’ve shared more details here: The 8 Ps of Marketing: Why Positioning Is the Foundation.

That’s all we have time for today.

Until our next BrandTherapy session…

Thanks,

Andy

P.S. Know a business owner who seems to be wrestling with their positioning, marketing, or what to do next? I’m always happy to meet smart people facing interesting business challenges. An introduction is always appreciated.