Fixing FinTech MarComms Part3 - Taking the P’s

I remember taking my seat for my first lecture at Manchester University (admittedly a few years ago now). My course was marketing with psychology and buyer behaviour. To be honest I didn't have a particular draw to marketing back then other than it seemed massively more interesting than accounting or production control and a lot less work than law or medicine.

Anyway, after a while the lecturer appears, pauses, and then says “if you remember nothing else about this course then remember the 4 P’s. He was referring, of course, to the bedrock of marketing - Product, Price, Place, Promotion otherwise known as the Marketing Mix first created by Jerome McCarthy in 1960. Since then they been tinkered with and added to so we now have the 7 P’s, the 4C’s the 4 E’s but the basic principles remain the same.

It amazes me how many FinTechs ignore or pay lip service to these principles so in this article I am going to try and redress the balance and then present my own new 4 P’s that should sit alongside the originals for effective marcomms in today's electronic, hyper connected world.

Product

Mmmm… some of you may be thinking - what has marketing got to do with what my product or service is or does? 

The answer is everything.

Success depends upon identifying and meeting a customer need in a new or better way. Let me give you an example. The leader of one firm I knew (who had a very technical background) was proudly telling me about how they were moving their product onto an entirely new platform. “All we have to do is work out who is going to buy it” he said nonchalantly. I sighed inwardly and surprise, surprise, a year later the project (having burned a ton of resource) was shelved.

The point is that your product needs to be the result of understanding the demand dynamics of your market (which I have covered in parts 1 and 2 of this series) rather than techie hubris.

Defining how the product fits the marketplace and creates value is the job of Marketing.

Price

While at Fidessa we created a product to show how equities were being traded in light of the MIFID reforms. Rather than charge for it we made it available for free together with regular commentary on what we thought was happening.  The product - The Fragulator - became a global phenomenon.  While we never made a penny directly from it, The Fragulator helped position Fidessa as THE thought leader in a market that was going through huge change and it served as a great way to engage with clients on our revenue generating products.

I think in today's world there are so many different pricing models and, anyway, is it money that you want or data (ideally both). I will cover this in more detail in a later post.

Place

In today’s hyper connected world, this is much less significant than when the 4P’s were first being crafted in the 60’s with its focus on physical distribution. That said the number of CEOs who say that their product is applicable everywhere and to every industry are dreaming.  Without substantial GTM, domain expertise, sales and support it will remain a dream. Only the largest global brands can afford to address every potential market for their products, so pick carefully.

Promotion

This is what most non marketeers think it's all about - attending trade shows, webinars, LinkedIn etc etc.  But without having gone through the steps outlined in parts 1 and 2 of this series then it can easily just turn into enthusiastic, flag waving noise - relatively harmless but with little impact on generating revenue.

So, let’s fast forward to today. At Vision57, we sought to create a new set of principles that reflect today's super interconnected world.

Briefly these are:

Purpose

Ensuring that your audience clearly understands what you do and why is vital. Attention spans are frighteningly short today so you need to be known as “oh you’re the guys that do xxx”.

People

Customers are increasingly bringing their consumer buying habits into the B2B domain and so they are much further along, and self informed in their customer journeys than ever before. This underlines the need for firms to engage early with the right people (prospects, customers, influencers and commentators) and relate their proposition to their real needs. 

Presence

In today’s digital domain “reaching” people is easy but holding their attention is much harder.  Marketing messages need to be combined into a set of easy to digest, reusable nuggets of information that all reinforce the core proposition (something I refer to as “Dim Sum” Marketing). When these are multi format and delivered simultaneously through multiple channels, then a real network effect can be created.

Point of View

Thought leadership is a massively overused phrase these days. Unfortunately, most of what passes as thought leadership today is simply a rehash of how the world currently operates. Real thought leadership asks the right questions and provides an exciting vision of how things “could be”. 

These new principles are not designed to replace the traditional 4 P’s but to supplement them. What's really interesting is when you combine them and use it as lens to review your entire marketing mix. And that’s where the fun really starts as it will open up your thinking especially when you try and fill in the less obvious boxes. And, you can always go one step further and create a third dimension that includes your competitors.