Beyond 4P's in Marketing to Weaponized Platforms

By Thomas B. Cross CEO - TECHtionary.com

The classical 4P's in marketing are price, place, promotion and product. Most companies mess up the mix because frankly it is rather hard to get it all right for far too many reasons to discuss today. Timing, budget, message, placement are some of the common mistakes. Albeit if you mess up you can really kill your business. 

Peter Adams of Rockies Venture Club an angel investment group has said for decades that "Marketing is the #1 cause of startup failure." I would add - why stop at startups, you can kill your company at any time or at any stage by not getting marketing right. The new P or two to add to this could be either privacy or platform or both. If you mess up someone's privacy you can still survive, even thrive as Facebook has despite of all their privacy violations. Retailers, credit reporting agencies and the many others that mess up privacy have all survived because consumers has no voice in the game and are left shrugging their shoulders hoping it won't happen to them again knowing that it likely will occur. Google announced their voice assistant won't be saving user's voice recordings anymore and if you believe that I have a bridge to sell you. No word from Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and others on their voice assistant platforms though if you asked most people believe these companies are still listening to what users are saying especially when it comes to ordering anything they need.  

The other P is platform and there is no doubt in anyone's mind that social media platforms have taken over many aspects of marketing. Similar to the way ecommerce giants are killing off retailers like cancer, social media platforms have taken over the news and business broadcasting and communications. We get our personal news on Facebook, political news on Twitter, fashion news on Pinterest and business news on Linkedin. These are just the top platforms, there are hundreds more. Indeed, each covers more than just what was mentioned but when you add in hate, shame, views and toxic comments of the most outrageous kind you can easily find all of that on these platforms as well. The platforms say they try to remove thousands of accounts on a daily basis accounts suspected of fraud, counterfeiting, fake, deep fake and other misdemeanor crimes but they are hardly keeping up with the rampage of new accounts filed on behave of state-sponsored, professional hackers, political tom foolery or worse. 

Most importantly, each of these platforms has been weaponized for specific business intellectual property theft, espionage, sabotage targeting political, business and massive attacks on individuals. In business any kind of crisis can “kill the bottom-line” as well as kill or delay customer acquisition. One of the many reasons social media platforms are killing business is that in our research we have found an increasing number of customers spend a lot of time in before, during and after purchase in due diligence to avoid the pending RGE (resume generating event aka being fired) factor. That is, both current and prospective customers are looking for thought leadership, examples of vendor crisis news as well as customer complaints regarding solutions before or after solution acquisition. To an increasingly extent, competitors and professional sabotage groups are pushing this negative content. This will not stop but only increase as these platforms extend their reach. Businesses of all sizes must take actions to prevent them from financial ruin. There are many ways to stop this but here is one action you can take today.

Take Action Today: Delete all social media accounts and build your own social network(s) for both internal and external communications to stop the toxic nonsense, mis/disinformation (anti-vaxers), weaponized media, cyberbullies, shamers, haters, privacy violations, fake and deep fake attacks. The reason is simple you cannot predict, you cannot react to these attacks, you can only direct your own messaging. That is, the only way to control your destiny is by building it yourself not using any other platform. If you prefer, no better weapon to have than your own.

I would also recommend you consider getting this seminar/webinar for your business - email [email protected] for details