Marketing 4.0: Guiding Awareness to Advocacy (Traditional to Digital): The Video Transcript

Hello everyone, this is Profia Bong and today we’ll talk about Marketing 4.0 from the book by Philip Kotler and it’s about Guiding Awareness from Awareness to Advocacy or Traditional to Digital.

So there are four parts to this, about the four marketing paradigms, the shift from 1.0 which was product-driven to the second paradigm which is customer-centric, third is human-centric and awareness to advocacy.

The First Four Marketing Paradigms

Marketing 1.0: Product-Driven

First, we look at the first paradigm which was product-driven and if you can call any product a mousetrap or a gizmo, it is convinced that there’s money in mousetraps or gizmos.

So once upon a time, it’s all about better products and if you have a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. So get a good product, an excellent product and problem solved.

And in fact, once upon a time, power and decisions all came from the manufacturer.

Like Henry Ford said that any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it’s black.

At the back of his mind, making only one color was faster and allowed economies of scale and huge output. That was before but even up to 1989, this was the philosophy said in the movie, if you build it, they will come.

You just need a product for people to buy. You may say this is ancient but even the world’s most innovative and creative company still limits its colors to reduce production and complexity because it has a deeper insight that the secondary market would take care of customization.

So Apple initially had only black, white colors of its iPhone and only recently had it added a few more colors but it’s still saying we decide for the customer.

So that is marketing 1.0.

Marketing 2.0: Customer-Centric

Marketing 2.0 has a different philosophy. More than product, we have to be customer-centric and the focus shifts from the company and its products to the customer.

And all the company needs to do is always to lead all actions to customer satisfaction.

For example, in the car industry, the reason there are different cars from one manufacturer is because there are different customers. So this is the customer-centric paradigm.

Marketing 3.0: Human-Centric

So more than customers, we should treat each customer not just as a name or a number or a statistic for reports but knowing that behind the headlines and the numbers is a human story.

So this person who had a relative who was killed maybe because of drugs or other crimes are not just statistics, they’re humans. Even in politics, behind the numbers of satisfaction, trust are person brands.

So again, emphasizing the importance of human at the back of every marketing effort.

So we evolve as humans over time. Still, marketing, if it is human-centric, will aim for and win the customer’s share of mind, heart, and wallet.

And there could be debates about the value of celebrity endorsers versus just using word of mouth. Owners’ values or the owners’ branding as part of or superseding their own brands and also the use of human values of certain brands. But that’s 3.0, human-centric marketing.

Marketing 4.0: Awareness to Advocacy

What is 4.0? It’s guiding customers from awareness to advocacy.

Marketing 4.0 is really marketing 3.0, the human-centric and enabled by technology and disrupted by technology and globalization with social responsibility is really marketing 4.0 where there’s a new customer journey.

The old journey was from A1 to A4 and you may still be familiar with the acronym AIDA, which is awareness, interest, desire, and action, which is the journey of the customer from just knowing about the product to finally buying it.

Pre-connectivity days, AIDA was also presented as the four A’s theory of customer journey, where again, it’s awareness and action, and in the middle, interest and desire is attitude, and aside from action, it’s act and act again or the effort to get the repeat purchase.

This customer journey was embodied also in the marketing funnel, where we see that a brand starts with aiming for target market so that they become aware, try the product, become recent users and regular users until they like it so much that that’s the brand used most often, at which case they will only be loyal customers to the brand unless something changes.

This is the customer path from awareness to loyalty, and through all this path, the customer is actually a user of the product.

Connectivity Adds Two Steps: Ask and Advocate

Now, with connectivity, there are two new steps or phases, ask and advocate. Instead of four steps of A1 to A4, it’s now A1 to A5, where again, ask and advocate are totally new.

In this new customer journey during connectivity period, there are four new customer journeys.

One is the familiar funnel, but there are three others depending on the industry and the product, and as it goes from A1 to A5, what’s A1?

A1 is awareness, two is appeal, three is ask, four is act and fifth is advocate.

And again, the ideal pattern for this journey is this no longer a funnel, but a bowtie.

In this shift, customers are influenced by three factors, their own, the others, opinion and outer factors, which is represented in the ozone model by Philip Cutler.

And to succeed and be influenced, the brands should be able to influence the own, the other and the outer during their customer journey.

Marketing Mix Shift: 4 Ps to 4 Cs

Another thing that changed is the marketing mix. From the traditional four Ps, there are now new corresponding four Cs.

Instead of just product being created by the brand and the company, it’s now a co-creation with the customers. For instance, YouTube, the content is created by the customers while the infrastructure and the hardware is created by the owners of YouTube. So it’s co-created and most mixes today in the connectivity area are co-created.

YouTube, Facebook, Instagram are all co-creations with the customer.

Second, instead of a fixed price, it’s now more of a currency where the price will change depending on many factors, but it is more different than the same like currencies of the peso and the US dollar which changes on a day-to-day, hour-to-hour basis.

The third P, which is place, is no longer a fixed channel but activation within the community like Facebook marketplace. It doesn’t have to be a channel, a physical channel, it is activated within the community.

The last P is promotion and while before we know of promotion as TV, radio, personal selling, word of mouth, now it’s conversation among horizontal groups of customers and a lot of it is done in social media.

Examples of Advocacy

So some examples of advocacies are from Solar Philippines which advocates pollution-free renewable energy from the sun.

Volunteers and strong advocates like Anna from the Philippine Animal Welfare Society or Ms. Gina Lopez, who was even before her time as DENR secretary, was a fierce advocate for environmental protection.

Certain businesses like network marketing rely on word of mouth to spread the marketing message virally.

For me, I have two personal case studies of advocacies which I did for free using digital media and over many years to support two things.

The first one was to support a nine-year-old girl in her quest to become the first woman grandmaster and I helped set up a Facebook page, campaign on social media, and we were able to get sponsors from friends from all around the world, the Philippines, the US, Australia, and Malaysia, which were instrumental in us sponsoring her through at least three tournaments sometime in 2016. Now she’s a woman’s national master and still getting better.

The second personal advocacy I have was when I learned optimal breathing, which again is very important for health, and even without payment I became an advocate in 2013 and for the past eight years have been pushing for people to learn about this optimal type of breathing.

So these are just two examples of the shift of marketing paradigms from product-driven to customer-centric to human-centric, and today with digital and connectivity, the drive within the new customer journey is from awareness to advocacy.

This is Marketing 4.0.