As a communications professional, have you ever wondered whether you should be considered part of the marketing team or a separate department? At the end of the day, if you are not involved in price decisions or do not have a say about placement, should you be considered a marketing specialist? We asked this question to Philip Kotler.
-Is communications itself a separate science, or do you consider it as part of marketing?
-It is both. Communication goes everywhere, whether there is a marketing force or practice or something else. Military personnel communicate all the time, and there is no money involved or anything; there is just communication. I recently wanted to change what goes into the marketing plan from 4 Ps to 7, except I don’t have letters P for the other three. Besides product, price, place and promotion, let me add three more things. Besides product, add the word service. Don’t say, ‘Oh, my product has some service too as an incidental thing.’ No, service is very important. For example, I bought a product and I want to call up to understand how it works and you did not set up an easy number for me to call you to find out how the product works? This is something that needs to be planned. As far as price, yes, there is usually a price that is your fixed price. But you never sell it at your fixed price because let’s say times are a little slow so you’re going to discount. We call those incentives, managing pricing and incentives goes along the way. The third, I think the word brand has to be a separate thing that is planned. Yes, you have a product, and you have a service; brand is to be managed as another thing because you either have a strong brand and you’ve got to make sure it is carried everywhere by all your people and appreciated and respected or otherwise it gets unmanaged and so on. There are two more things that need to be done: one is communications, and the other one is distribution. Communications are essential in marketing and outside of marketing too because you’re going to get the message out about what you make and why it is desirable. And distribution is to deliver on the promise that you gave during your communications. Now here is where the problems occur, namely, you say that your product is the fastest cleaning product of all the detergents, but technically they are all fast, but maybe you are faster by milliseconds, so you are coasting on something that is not substantial enough to be the claim that you should have done. If someone starts investigating and they will say it is a millisecond faster, they will expose you, word of mouth. Better work to be done between people who are communicating and the people who are the salespeople; they are communicators too. You do not control them. Your work has been to create a copy about the product, but they also create a copy about the product because they talk to consumers. They might say much more than they should. Communications is a key part to be successful in marketing.
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