BLOGGING and the 4 P’s of Marketing

During my MBA class back then, Marketing (the subject) was one of my most anticipated one. I heard quite a lot of stories about how interesting it is from really old people. I have also read marketing books (though not that much) and find some of it to be interesting and informative. But as we know by now, disappointments in life are of common occurrence, and my marketing class turned out to be a snooze fest.

Come the comprehensive exams, I am not really sure what I am going to do with the perceived (my own perception that is) lack of understanding on the subject matter. But good thing that life is full of disappointments, as it turned out that the exams were relatively easy for me. You know why? It was just all about utilizing one, single, bisan isa lang ka idea or concept in marketing.

I may not be an MBA yet during that time, but I have common sense. The simplest thing to do then is to utilize the simplest and easily remembered concept and take off from there, which is, tadan; the 4 P’s of marketing.

Notwithstanding my long intro, the 4 P’s says that Marketing decisions generally fall into the four controllable categories: Product, Price, Place, Promotion. This entry really is related to blogging and tries to come up with a fun analogy, parallelism and irony between the two.

PRODUCT
In business (unless blogging is your business), the objective is ultimately to sell the product and contribute to the bottom line. In blogging, you don’t necessarily need to sell the product, meaning nobody needs to read your blogs and yet it would contribute to your bottom line.

Many are blogging just to release pent up emotions. Some would even prefer that nobody will read their posts. Some blogs are only directed to certain individuals or groups. But more often than not, bloggers wants as much traffic as possible for one reason or another. May it be for monetizing or they just want to feel appreciated for their ideas.

PRICE
In business, price plays the biggest factor in determining whether you will be a patronized or not. Will we be doing premium pricing or mass produced pricing. These are the usual issues.

In blogging, it is how much are you willing to pay, both literal and figurative that determine how your blog will roll. Are you willing to spend long hours even up to dawn in tweaking your html much to the detriment of your sleep? Are you willing to give up a portion of your privacy and share to the world some of your deepest secrets and desires? How much money and resources are you actually spending in doing all these stuff?

PLACE
In business it generally refers to the ways on how your product reaches your customer. It talks about logistics, distribution channels, market coverage, among others. It is diverse and wide in scope.

In blogging, all you need to be is in your house, coffee shop with free wifi, net cafes or even hulog2x piso internet stalls/ machines. Yet it is even more diverse and world wide web in scope.

PROMOTIONS
In business much time, effort and money is spent in promoting the product. Certain strategies are even employed as to optimize the promotional activities. The goal will always be to generate a positive customer response.

In blogging, you may or may not promote your product (again unless you are blogging for money). If there is a promotional strategy such as push or pull in business, in blogging it is just; publish, delete, public or private. It is interesting to note though that blog that are monetize, tend to do lots of promotion, even to the point of spamming.

The 4 P’s was only a very useful tool on the early times of the marketing concept. Blogging on the other hand just kept getting bigger, nastier and lot’s of irrelevant posts such as this entry are proliferating. :P