Product, Place, Promotion, and Price.

product, place, promotion, and price. Today, some suggest that companies should organize and manage around the 4 C's: customer value, lower costs, better convenience, and better communication. Discuss the causes and the benefits of such a shift in focus.

The foundational elements of marketing have long been based on the synchronization of the 4Ps in the development, execution and monitoring of marketing strategies. Product, price, promotion and place or distribution succinctly defines the critical components of any marketing strategy (Constantinides, 2006). This has been so pervasive that entire corporations build their strategic planning and market planning activities on the 4Ps of marketing, often including the ability to track performance over time for each of these aspects of a marketing strategy (Birnik, Bowman, 2007). Studies have been completed to specifically on the effectiveness of using these components of a marketing strategy in conjunction with one another, showing pricing is the most complex in keeping in balance to all other factors in the mix (Grapentine, 2006). Despite the standardization of corporations on the 4Ps, marketing myopia has set in to many companies (Levitt, 2004) and their focus gets diffused and distracted from the main objectives they set out to accomplish. Arguably the 4Ps do not completely and conclusively define the current set of market and competitive forces that are impacting companies. In addition, the 4Ps do not capture the aspects of customer value and the fact that the Internet has enabled entirely new approaches to connecting and collaborating with customers. While the 4Ps do capture the essential functional areas required to create a marketing strategy (Grapentine, 2006) it does not provide a framework for defining and measuring lifetime customer value.

Because of these factors and the paradigm shift that has occurred in the creation, execution, and monitoring of marketing strategies, customer value, lower costs, better convenience and better communication have become the new 4Ps or marketing, and are called the 4Cs. The aspect of customer value has specifically led to entirely new market segmentation models, in addition to the creation of entirely new approaches to maximizing customer loyalty over the long-term. In addition, lower costs have become commonplace, starting in the most commoditized industries, and have increasingly become pervasive in higher- margin, more differentiated industries as well. Managing marketing to costs is critical as the gulf between traditional advertising media including print and television get undercut by the costs of using the Internet and electronic media for advertising. Costs also are part of the unique value proposition of companies who operate in highly commoditized industries as well. Better convenience is a direct result of the use of the Internet for streamlining supply chains and making products and services more accessible on the one hand, and the increasing time pressures consumers are under continually on the other. Convenience became critical when the majority of married couples had both spouses working in either part-time and full-time jobs; as a result of these time pressure convenience and the quality of its consistent delivery is a major differentiator today. Lastly, the Internet has brought about a revolution in how consumers prefer to communicate with each other, the companies they purchase products and services from, and with their financial institutions as well. The fact that the collection of technologies collectively known of as Web 2.0 (Bernoff, Li, 2008) has served as the catalyst for higher levels of collaboration and communication between consumers, their families, the companies they purchase products and services from, and organizations they interact with. Communication and with it, transparency and the development of trust are all critical in the development of a stable and sustainable marketing strategy, further accentuating the core brand of a business.

Part 2: A manufacturer of computer chips has been unable to convince her dealers to give her the names and addresses of the end consumer. She understands CRM and wants to implement a plan that includes both the dealers and the end users. Define an approach that the manufacturer can take to build a CRM environment that provides optimal flow of all relative information in support of the company-consumer relationships. The response should take into account the company's culture, size, structure (functional, brand alignment, geographic, account management, industry category, matrix, by customer), technology, and processes.