Dr Philip Kotler, the Marketing Guru recently visited India and shared that he has refined his legendary theory of Marketing which was based on the four P’s – Product, Place, Promotion and Price and has added another P to the same called Perception which describes the sentiment about the product in the market.
In his earlier definition he mentioned that “Marketing is a social and managerial process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and want through creating and exchanging products and value with others.”
He also defined Customer Relationship Management (CRM) as “the overall process of building and maintaining profitable customer relationships by delivering superior customer value and satisfaction.”
The Social Process has changed with the advent of social media and big data and even the CRM is vastly dependent on e-connect, therefore the need to have another P parameter called Perception. This relates to the emotional connect with the product and not necessarily to hard data value proposition.One can analyze lots of big data in real time and generate insights from the same, but what to do with those insights and how to leverage them to create an emotional connect with people is an art form of marketing and will stay for a long time. The big data and real time analytics is only one of the tools that a marketing company may use but this is not going to take away the true marketers jobs.
