What is marketing?
Ask the question of 10 business owners and you’ll get 10 different answers.
To some it is an activity…
To some it is a department where brochures are made…
To some it is ‘advertising’…
To some it is ‘sales’…
To some it’s more about the brand…
To some it’s about shelf space…
To some it’s about location…
and to some, it’s about getting out to shake hands.
The answer, of course, is that marketing is all of those things. But how does one make sense of all of those ‘things’ that marketing is?
In business school, I learned that marketing can be more or less equally divided into five Ps: Product, Price, Place and Promotion.
The way you work with these five Ps is called your ‘marketing mix’ which, if you get it just right, will make you rich. 
You must have the right product, and the right price, delivered in the right way (place), to a warm audience (promotion). If you are The Coca-Cola Company or General Motors, then this model of marketing might work for you. If not, it provides no real value in helping people understand what marketing is.
Right about now, the astute reader will have noticed that I only listed four of the five Ps. I “forgot” the fifth P on purpose because it was added later. While engaged in marketing conversations in academic circles, those that remembered to include the new P were immediately understood to be astute marketers who were on the cutting edge of academic thought. The new P, of course, was People. 
Makes you wonder how much research was required to justify the radical addition of this new P.
Also, later, a bunch of academics who apparently either didn’t like alliteration or maybe got tired of explaining that Place really isn’t a place but more of a word to describe a distribution channel, decided that Place should be changed to Channel. So now, instead of the 5 Ps of marketing, we have four Ps and a C, just doesn’t quite work as well. I personally, wish those fancy pants professors would have left well enough alone and let the 5 Ps drift off into obscurity.
I think the 5 Ps are, and have always been, a horrible way to describe what marketing is.
Marketing is more like a layer cake.
OK, it doesn’t look like a layer cake, but this is an old graphic and I didn’t want to try to actually make it look like a cake. It’s the layer part that is important. Marketing happens in layers — each has a different flavor and texture, but it all goes together in one fully-baked combination of different marketing ingredients.
It starts with a strong business foundation — the basics of doing business. For Infopreneurs, it’s a computer, web hosting, some basic desktop software, a legal business entity, telephone, bank account, payment processor, etc. Without the basic foundational elements of a business, marketing can only be in-effective. But, fortunately, in the Infopreneur business model, it is not difficult to build a strong business foundation. In fact, it’s probably the simplest business model you can find when it comes to business foundation.
On top of the business foundation, you have the Marketing Foundation — it’s made up of four blocks: Market, Product, Channel, and Brand.
These are the true foundations of marketing for any business. You need a market — an audience of prospects who have needs that you can fill. You need a product that matches the needs of your market. You need to be able to reach that audience through a sales and distribution channel. And, finally, if you don’t stand for something, you will stand for nothing. Your brand communicates who you are and it is equally as important as the other blocks.
On top of the Marketing Foundation, you build a Promotional Structure. This is the series of steps your prospects go through on their way to becoming customers, repeat customers, and evangelists. For the Infopreneur, the promotional structure is really a combination of copy, design, and technology. Our customers follow a clear, one-way, path from sales letter to download page… to problem solved. And, if we are doing it right, we have other solutions to offer to those same customers.
Your promotional structure is, essentially, your customer-making factory. And we are fortunate. Just think how complex the promotional structure is for a business that has 50 or 60 field sales reps, 5 customer service reps, and 4 inside sales reps. As Infopreneurs, the basic building blocks of our ‘factory’ are simple and measurable, something you won’t find in many other business models.
And finally, you drive Traffic into your promotional structure. Traffic is the juice that runs the machine and, if you build your Marketing Foundation and Promotional Structure correctly, you won’t have much trouble generating all the traffic you want.
Now doesn’t that make more sense?
Sure, it takes a little explaining, and the words don’t alliterate nor do they rhyme, but I’m going to go out on an ego limb here and say that I think the Four Layers of Marketing makes a whole lot more sense than the Four Ps and a C.
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{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Great post, Doug. Really good way of breaking it all down into something that is easy to understand.
I like how you distinguished between customers, repeat customers, and evangelists. Most people think the job is done after the first sale when it’s actually just getting started.
Ryan
Hey Ryan,
I’ve really enjoyed getting to know you through Twitter. Thanks for taking the time to comment here. I owe the Evangelists part to Willie Crawford who pointed out to me that there is that third type of customer.
Hi Doug — nicely put!
Marketing is often misunderstood because its classic definition (“identify an unmet need and satisfy it”) is so manifestly inadequate. No emotion involved, for a start, and it only represents the first 5 of the 8 stages in the complete Fulfilment Spiral.
The whole purpose of The Fulfilment Spiral is to turn your buyers into your most productive, profitable sellers — or evangelists, as Willie puts it. And that takes a considerable amount of emotional output.
Those three final, missing stages make all the difference, and they’re precisely what’s missing from most marketing strategies. So we end up with half-baked “solutions” like loyalty programs and “ethical bribes”, none of which create any real loyalty because they ARE bribery!
If the role of the marketer is to “identify an unmet need and satisfy it”, the role of the seller is critically important: to get people to WANT what they need, because no matter how much they may NEED your solution, until they WANT it, they won’t BUY it.
I’ve always like the analogy comparing marketing to duck hunting.
The marketer knows where the ducks are, when they’re there and why they’re there. He/she knows when it legal to shoot them, and how many. He/she attracts the ducks with decoys, sounds, etc and scares the unattracted ones into the air. He/she loads and aims the gun and pulls the trigger… then sends the sellers after them to bring them back in!
John
Hi John! Long time no chat
I hope I see you a lot around here.
“The whole purpose of The Fulfilment Spiral is to turn your buyers into your most productive, profitable sellers — or evangelists, as Willie puts it. And that takes a considerable amount of emotional output.”
I like your idea of using a sprial metaphor — much more true to what actually happens instead of a funnel metaphor.
Thanks for adding to the conversation.
Hi Doug,
Wonderful post and insightful.
I agree that without a proper structure, your marketing can be in vain.
In my former work, I dealt with civil engineering and construction inspection where we always dealt with the base foundation being the key to solid support. Without it, the loveliest architect’s rendering would be nothing without proper structure.
As such, once a project is completed, the public eye sees the finished product, perhaps without understanding all the intricate layers that go into producing it in the first place.
I like your take on Willie Crawford’s use of the evangelists. Once you get loyal customers who understand your product/service/structure more completely, and are using it to help their goals/businesses, they are naturally going to tell others about you and your product(s).
Thanks for your tips!
Paul Klein
Interesting Paul. I often use the metaphor (it must be metaphor day here, LOL) of a building to describe the marketing foundation concept. Especially with clients who tend to get anxious until they can see the shiny walls go up!
Hi Doug,
Great post and I totally agree. However I wonder why you have not mentioned a dream/vision/goals layer? Is that not considered part of marketing?
Ray
Hi Ray,
Glad you liked the post. Great question also — let me take them one at a time.
In my system, Vision is part of the Brand block in the Marketing Foundation. I take a larger view of “Brand” than a lot of people – for me, Brand is first about Vision, then about Values (the core ‘rules’ or that drive how a company behaves) and then, finally, about Personality (the outward representation of what a company stands for).
Goals, however, are part of a planning process that isn’t necessarily part of the Marketing meta-structure, but certainly informed by the various elements of marketing. Goals aren’t, structurally, part of the marketing picture, but they should certainly be in sync with it — so some goals are marketing related, and some aren’t.