In the early 1960s, Professor Neil Borden at Harvard Business School identified a number of company performance actions that can influence the consumer decision to purchase goods or services. Borden suggested that all those actions of the company represented a “Marketing Mix”.
The four P’s of Marketing are:
- Product
- Pricing
- Placement
- Promotion
Internet marketing is just another way to market…right? Well, sort of. We can market using traditional means and experience success, but the internet, unlike any other medium, allows a more personal approach.
Anyone with a TV knows the name Billy Mays. Infomercials use personality based marketing to build a relationship between the presenter and viewer. The problem with TV is there is no long term search value to the personality of the presenter or presentation. Using the internet, we can create a infomercial type discussion with long term search value.
We need four additional P’s:
- Personality
- Purpose
- Perspective
- Patterns
Personality as in a personal look at you. Your hobbies, believes, and personal experiences. These become connection points to others like you. All things being equal, people prefer to do business with people they like.
Purpose: Trying to get listed high enough for your industry keywords is very difficult. Our purpose, then is to capture attention from prospects when they are NOT looking for business, but rather browsing the interest for entertainment, education, or encouragement.
Perspective should always be focused on the desires of your target customer. If your target customer likes dogs, then writing about your love of dogs will build a relationship with the visitor.
Pattern could also be called strategy. Since we are writing on topics of interest, not necessarily connected with business, we need some way of drawing readers over to our business website. If we are targeting dog lovers, then we need to include a subtle hint how our love of dogs affect our business life.
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Hi Ed.
Your post stimulates to share one of mine (in french) few months ago on To do business on the Internet, know your 3W's before your 4 P's .
I was refering to:
- Who is your profitable client (the 20% who generate over 80% of your profit; not your revenue)? Who manage a blog? What are his main search keywords on the internet? What are his fear on the internet? How many languages can he use on the internet?
- Where does he go over the Web; professionnaly and personnaly? Your client's Web moves will tell you more than any survey.
- What's in it for him at each click on your Web environment (site, blog, ecommerce, …)? Speed to deliver results at every step of your relationship with your client is a powerful qualification and satisfaction criteria during his buying process.
Those information will lead you to know who really is your client, where to find him in this organic Web environment and what content and results to provide: online and offline!
Take care!