The Illusion of Five-Minute Marketing

Fr. Guido Sarducci, the Vatican’s envoy to the US, once created the “Five-Minute University”, where he would teach you, in five minutes, all the average graduate remembers five years after leaving school.  His Spanish course? ¿Como está usted? ¡Muy bien gracias!  That’s it.  All the average graduate remembers five years after leaving school.  Takes about five minutes to learn.  His business course: “you buy something, you sell it for more”.  All this for only $20, including a graduation ceremony, cap and gown.

And Marketing?  Well, Fr. Sarducci’s university didn’t offer a Marketing course, but if he did, it would probably be: “three C’s, four P’s”.

Fr. Sarducci was a fiction created by the TV show Saturday Night Live in the 1970’s, but the satire bites.  Of course most people don’t remember much of Marketing after they leave school.  That’s because they learned new tools, not new perspectives.

The three C’s (customers, competitors and company) and the four P’s (product, price, promotion and place) are the staples of Marketing courses at university.  And for good reason: they are intuitively easy and useful.  They provide a group of convenient categories for analysis and, with enough flexibility, could include just about anything. 

Understanding the three C’s and the four P’s gives you the illusion that you understand Marketing.  All you have to do is to plug in some numbers, add a dash of creativity, and off you go.  But in the real world, things do not happen quite so neatly.  Branding, for example, is inconvenient: it isn’t quite product, or price, or place, or promotion, but all of these, and more.  (Plus it begins with a B, not a C or a P).  And while the model implies that analysis (the three C’s) precedes marketing programs (the four P’s), in reality everything happens together, iteratively.  We analyze a bit, try something out, go back to the drawing board, analyze again, and so on.

The illusion is that Marketing is a set of tools, as opposed to a different perspective on business.  The piece that is missing from the “three C’s, four P’s” model is customer value. All that analysis, all that energy and effort, must be integrated to focus on a single idea: providing superior value to the business’ customers.  The silos created by the traditional model are misleading because integration, not division, is the key to Customer Value Design.

Customer Value Design can be thought of as four sets of activities (not silos) that happen iteratively, not sequentially: creating customer value, delivering customer value, growing customer value and measuring customer value.

The task of creating customer value is to derive insights through an intimate understanding of customers.  Marketers have long been aware that customers do not know, or are unable to articulate, what they want.  This raises a difficulty: how can you understand customer needs when customers themselves don’t know?  Insight-driven research uses observational and qualitative methods to get beyond the obvious and create propositions that have true meaning in customers’ personal or professional lives.  The user-friendliness of Apple’s iPod, for example, exhibits an intimacy with consumers who want something cool, easy to use and powerful – yet because consumers could never have envisaged an iPod, they could never have asked for it.

Delivering customer value is about enhancing the core insight with programs for pricing and distribution.  The price of a brand such as Yellowtail wine, for example, is as much a part of the proposition as the contents of the bottle: not so cheap that it degrades the brand, but not so expensive that it becomes elitist.  Growing customer value involves going beyond ordinary ways of communicating with customers, into integrated marketing communications in unconventional media with messages that reflect true insights about customers.

With the desire of many businesses to understand the marketing ROI, measuring customer value means pulling together all these programs and understanding their financial contribution.  This involves developing a model of how customers make decisions over time, the investment required to get and keep them and their lifetime value to the company.

Canada’s business community includes many graduates of the five-minute university.  Yet the Customer Value Design model is even simpler: just keep customer value at the centre of your efforts, and you won’t go far wrong.  Perhaps we should launch a one-minute university.