The 5th P of Marketing - People - Create Brand Ambassadors of your people

The name of the game for any brand manager today is romancing the customer with a view to establishing a long-term relationship. Relationship, not product, is key. Relationships bind, have duration, foster loyalty, create repeat sales. The sum total of millions of relationships is a priceless asset that never appears on the brand balance sheet, but given the tremendous cost of customer acquisition, it is a foundation of profitability. One-night stands are expensive; companies need to marry customers, preferably for life.

Marketing 101 reduces the main determinants of customer loyalty to the familiar Four Ps: Product, Place, Promotion and Price. These are all critical factors, but marketing orthodoxy is myopic, for reasons that are often lodged right in the structure and culture of corporations. The result is that a fifth P is typically left out of the reckoning: People. Specifically, I mean the people who actually deal with the customer during any part of the transaction. The delivery of the brand promise often happens by human agency at the point of sale and proceeds through service, complaint and resale. Yet marketers, who have the bottom-line responsibility for brand health, rarely focus on the Fifth P.

Why this neglect? In part it's because this Fifth P manifests itself far from marketing headquarters, and a corporation's customer-facing employees are not often the responsibility of brand managers but are instead relegated to what is usually called human resources.

Adding a fifth P may sound easy, but organizational rigidity stands in the way. The CEO must demand that top-level marketing and human resource teams share insights and develop a permanent program that accounts for the employee in the brand equation.

If you need help aligning people to your Brand, contact Jerome@thebrandtheatre.net for help with your internal branding process.