In this recent post on mycustomer.com, Yuchun Lee argues that there are three interrelated trends that are rendering some B2C marketing techiques obsolete: The rise of consumer power, a budget shift to interactive marketing and an upsurge in marketing complexity.

To counter this, Yuchun suggests B2C marketers should be considering an alternative “4Ps” of marketing: personalisation, presence, persuasion and permission. I think that B2B marketers are seeing similar trends, and they can take a lot from what Yuchun writes. Here’s how the new 4Ps could be put to use for B2B marketers. 

Personalisation In B2C, this means systematically tailoring offerings and relationships to the needs of individual customers, often in real-time. For B2B marketers, we should be leveraging the opportunity to create communications that are always relevant and helpful, and ensuring that the recipients’ channel and content preferences are understood and used.

Presence. Yuchun states, “As the buying process increasingly incorporates online channels, physical distribution and placement become less important. Today, marketers need something broader: presence. Presence manifests itself in keyword searches, in online product reviews, blog endorsements and recommendations made on social networks.” Even in a mid-sized B2B firm, especially one in IT, you will find your company and your product debated online whether you like it or not. You might as well use what other people are saying about your company and product to get a head-start in your market research. As marketers in B2B IT, we often never get to use the products we are marketing. The people commenting online do. They are a convenient and cheap market research tool.

Yuchun adds that a presence-based strategy requires deeper knowledge about customers, and more reliable signaling as to when they are preparing to act. Adding intelligence to B2B marketing systems ought to reduce wasteful over-promotion at the same time it increases response.

Persuasion. Yuchun says that “Marketers have traditionally sought to ’shout’ at their customers to break through the clutter” whereas “persuasion begins with the desire to be helpful to a potential buyer.” This means crafting messages that are more relevant and useful to each customer. This is just as true in the B2B world. The best campaigns listen to what the customer has to say – they then use that to generate interesting content that adds to the knowledge available in the market place. B2B marketers should aim to make their company a useful resource for the buyer.

Permission. Yuchun says, “Permission underpins the entire customer relationship…Marketers who accept this stop thinking about bombarding customers, and start thinking about how to make the most of each contact a customer is willing to offer.” Absoutely! We often take this one step further in our B2B campaign design, and refer to this as ”value exchange”.  Marketing campaigns are inflinitely more successful when they appreciate that the campaign target is in control, and that communicating with them is a privilege that needs to be earned.