Is Marketing becoming more complex?

Jeff Sheehan posted a provocative poll (below) asking whether or not marketing is getting more difficult.

Here's my response.

Yes and no.

I too have been laboring in the marketing vineyards for way too long.

The challenges remain the same despite appearances to the contrary.

The more things change tactically, the more they stay the same strategically.

The 4Ps of marketing I learned in school--product, price, promotion and place (distribution)--remain a deceptively simple but powerful framework.

The last two Ps are the ones that have changed the most. Promotion that was physical is now digital. The postal mailbox has been replaced by the digital inbox. The print as has become pixelated.

Ad fraud used to be perpetrated by selling space in magazines that were never read, or even printed, or dumping direct mail in the river and pocketing the postage. Today it has scaled into a multibillion organized cybercrime well documented by fraudbusters such as Dr. Augustine Fou - Ad Fraud Researcher.

At the end of the proverbial day, the essence of marketing remains an exercise in behavioral psychology--analyzing what we used to call the target market (now demilitarized into the kinder, gentler "persona"), developing rhetoric (messaging expressed in "content"--formerly copy) to attract attention, arouse interest, inspire desire, and incite action.