Do the Basic 4 P’s of Marketing Still Apply to Social Media?

You’ve heard about the 4 P’s. Maybe you studied a course in secondary school or you use them as a guide for your everyday marketing strategy?

Well, the 4 P’s have been a pillar of traditional marketing and strategy for years. But with the current fast-paced social media landscape being as it is, we’re actually wondering – how relevant the 4 P’s are to marketing today? How do they impact decisions and choices for campaigns on Facebook, Instagram or other?

If you’re unfamiliar with the 4 P’s, we’ll take a second to name them. 

Product. Price. Place. Promotion. 

These were engrained within every marketing strategy since its origin in the 1960s. E. Jerome McCarthy first explained the 4 P’s as the holy grail in the marketing mix. Marketers proved their worth by using these 4 P’s to build and practically apply their strategy to the world. Products new and old were sold to customers in need using strategies built around pricing (think 50% off), place (sold only at X) or promotion (for a limited time only). Now, with social media playing a larger role in how people think, buy and engage in the world around them, how wise would it be to continue with the 4 P’s?

What were the marketing considerations for the 4 P’s?

Let’s take product to start. Product, traditionally, was simply the good or service which you sold. How it was sold was either by its unique features or how you could market around its features.

With price, you focused on how much that good or service would cost, along with what it took to attract a new customer. Would a 20% discount draw consumer attention? Is price the main motivator? How much could I afford to discount to attract people?

If you were marketing around place, would you focus on broadcasting your message in specific places? Is the mall the best place to get the message out?

Even promotion was driven by where you marketed and how you marketed? What would you be promoting in general? How do you get the relevant information to the customer? These were common questions to traditional marketing strategies that involved 4 P’s thinking. 

Now, with all honesty, social media, while changing much of how we market, hasn’t changed the foundation of marketing. What do we mean? Let’s take this step by step, starting again with product.