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Marketing by Richard Ettenson, Eduardo Conrado, and Jonathan Knowles

Rethinking the 4 P’s Focus on

I
SOLUTION
t’s time to retool the 4 P’s of marketing for successfully making the shift from 4 P’s Instead of Define offerings by the
for today’s B2B reality. As a framework thinking to SAVE. Product needs they meet, not by
their features, functions, or
for fine-tuning the marketing mix, the First, management must encourage a technological superiority.
P’s—product, place, price, and promotion— solutions mind-set throughout the organi-
have served consumer marketers well for zation. Many B2B companies, particularly
half a century. But in the B2B world, they those with an engineering or a technol- Focus on
yield narrow, product-focused strategies ogy focus, find it difficult to move beyond ACCESS
that are increasingly at odds with the im- thinking in terms of “technologically su- Develop an integrated
cross-channel presence
perative to deliver solutions. perior” products and services and take a Instead of that considers customers’
In a five-year study involving more than customer-centric perspective instead. Place entire purchase journey
500 managers and customers in multiple Second, management needs to ensure instead of emphasizing
individual purchase
countries and across a wide range of B2B in- that the design of the marketing organiza- locations and channels.
dustries, we found that the 4 P’s model un- tion reflects and reinforces the customer-
dercuts B2B marketers in three important centric focus. At Motorola Solutions, this
ways: It leads their marketing and sales led to the dramatic reorganization of the Focus on
teams to stress product technology and marketing function into complementary Value
quality even though these are no longer dif- specialties, allowing focus on each element Articulate the benefits
Instead of relative to price, rather
ferentiators but are simply the cost of en- of the SAVE framework and alignment with Price than stressing how price
try. It underemphasizes the need to build the customer’s purchase journey. relates to production
a robust case for the superior value of their And third, management must create costs, profit margins, or
competitors’ prices.
solutions. And it distracts them from lever- collaboration between the marketing and
aging their advantage as a trusted source of sales organizations and with the develop-
diagnostics, advice, and problem solving. ment and delivery teams. Motorola Solu- Focus on
It’s not that the 4 P’s are irrelevant, just tions required that specialist teams con- Education
that they need to be reinterpreted to serve centrate on solutions and coordinate their Provide information
relevant to customers’
B2B marketers. As the chart at right shows, approaches to specific customer needs. specific needs at each
our model shifts the emphasis from prod- This ensured that functional boundaries Instead of point in the purchase
Promotion cycle, rather than relying
ucts to solutions, place to access, price to did not determine the firm’s solutions.
on advertising, PR, and
value, and promotion to education—SAVE, B2B marketers who continue to em- personal selling that
for short. brace the 4 P’s model and mind-set risk covers the waterfront.
Motorola Solutions, a pioneer of the getting locked into a repetitive and increas-
new framework, used SAVE to guide the ingly unproductive technological arms race.
Richard Ettenson is a professor at
restructuring of its marketing organization The SAVE framework is the centerpiece of Thunderbird School of Global Management.
and its go-to-market strategies in the gov- a new solution-selling strategy—and B2B Eduardo Conrado is a senior VP and the chief
marketing officer at Motorola Solutions.
ernment and enterprise sectors. Along the firms ignore it at their peril. 
Jonathan Knowles is the CEO of Type 2
way the firm identified three requirements HBR Reprint F1301C Consulting.


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