If we cannot reconcile digital and classic marketing, we will see further organisational silos, duplicated work and a lack of clarity and focus around roles and responsibilities that leads to inefficiency, frustration and bickering. Opportunities are missed and the growth that marketing, and the business, wants to deliver will by stymied.

For academia and providers of marketing education, it is important that what they teach is relevant and current with what the marketing industry and employing organisations require from their teams. We must encourage educators to update their courses and curricula with reference to a model like M3.

In creating M3, we have not sought to create a brand new intellectual and conceptual vision of marketing processes or terminology. We believe this is not required and risks being difficult to understand and disconnected from marketing professionals’ real world. Rather, we seek to clarify, structure, and make more consistent what are different dimensions and evolutions that we feel need to be brought together in a contemporary and holistic view (see chart below).

There are many elements where the tactical and executional opportunities may have changed, largely because of digital, but which do not need renaming for the sake of it. Conceptually they are still valid and based on robust and enduring data, research and best practice. These elements include marketing strategy, market orientation, customer insight, brand, segmentation, targeting, positioning and promotion. Even the change from ‘place’ to ‘distribution’ is slight.

Removing ‘price’ as a core element will no doubt excite debate. In our experience, price is rarely under the direct remit of the marketing function, except perhaps in FMCG businesses. Price is also still covered under other areas like ‘brand & value’ and ‘marketing strategy’.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.marketingweek.com