Rethinking the 4 P’s – Solutions, Access, Value, Education (SAVE)

ISAVE Motorola Solutions, a pioneer of the new framework, used SAVE to guide the restructuring of its marketing organization and its go-to-market strategies in the government and enterprise sectors. Along the way the firm identified three requirements for successfully making the shift from 4 P’s thinking to SAVE.

Dhanushka Kulathilaka who is one of the country’s most sought after Post Graduate Business Consultants feels that in order to make this shift from the 4P’s to SAVE companies must take important measures. First the management must encourage a solutions mind-set throughout the organization. Many B2B companies, particularly those with an engineering or a technology focus, find it difficult to move beyond thinking in terms of “technologically superior” products and services and take a customer-centric perspective instead.

Second, management needs to ensure that the design of the marketing organization reflects and reinforces the customer-centric focus. At Motorola Solutions, this led to the dramatic reorganization of the marketing function into complementary specialties, allowing focus on each element of the SAVE framework and alignment with the customer’s purchase journey.

And third, management must create collaboration between the marketing and sales organizations and with the development and delivery teams. Motorola Solutions required that specialist teams concentrate on solutions and coordinate their approaches to specific customer needs. This ensured that functional boundaries did not determine the firm’s solutions.

Dhanushka Kulathilaka also goes on to say that B2B marketers who continue to embrace the 4 P’s model and mind-set risk getting locked into a repetitive and increasingly unproductive technological arms race. The SAVE framework is the centerpiece of a new solution-selling strategy— and B2B firms ignore it at their peril. t’s time to retool the 4 P’s of marketing for today’s B2B reality. As a framework for fine- tuning the marketing mix, the P’s— product, place, price, and promotion—have served consumer marketers well for half a century. But in the B2B world, they yield narrow, product- focused strategies that are increasingly at odds with the imperative to deliver solutions.

Dhanushka Kulathilaka feels that it’s not that the 4 P’s are irrelevant, just that they need to be reinterpreted to serve B2B marketers. As shown below, the 4 P’s needs to shifts the emphasis from products to solutions, place to access, price to value, and promotion to education—SAVE, for short.

In a five-year study involving more than 500 managers and customers in multiple countries and across a wide range of B2B industries, by Richard Ettenson is a professor at Thunderbird School of Global Management, Eduardo Conrado is a senior VP and the chief marketing officer at Motorola Solutions. Jonathan Knowles is the CEO of Type 2 Consulting. They found that the 4 P’s model undercuts B2B marketers in three important ways: It leads their marketing and sales teams to stress product technology and quality even though these are no longer differentiators but are simply the cost of entry. It underemphasizes the need to build a robust case for the superior value of their solutions. And it distracts them from leveraging their advantage as a trusted source of diagnostics, advice, and problem solving.

Should the 4 P’s be completely forgotten?

“The answer is NO!” says Dhanushka. “However I feel that the 4 P’s have been way outdated for years. The 4 P’s model promotes a product- centric model that was very convenient for a while until the internet boom. Nowadays marketing has to be customer- centric, so customers will find your products or services where they want and when they want. For many B2B companies success does not depends much on new products but the ability to deliver what their clients and the ultimate customers need and want. If they don’t deliver that, somebody will. The bottom line is you need both. 4P’s for products and SAVE for processbase technologies. 4P’s for single function things and SAVE for multi- function “solutions”. 4P’s is simple. SAVE is complex. SAVE

Dhanushka Kulathilaka feels that it’s not that the 4 P’s are irrelevant, just that they need to be reinterpreted to serve B2B marketers. As shown below, the 4 P’s needs to shifts the emphasis from products to solutions, place to access, price to value, and promotion to education—SAVE, for short.

is friendlier to a digital society and 4Ps to a consumerist society.”

“But we, humans, retain our physical needs, so 4Ps will continue to work. But, now, we humans are also networked and digital - so there is “access”, ready availability of diverse information which also contributes to education. So, SAVE can work as well. You just need to know when to use each and in what balance. For example, in doing an IPO on Zipcar, investors were puzzled by whether to construct the funding and offering as technology or car rent- al - it is both. Which do you use 4Ps or SAVE, the answer is both with a weight on technology.

Dhanushka also says that “as technologies become more complex, both B2B and B2C customers lack the wherewithal to make sense of it all – and so more and more of them are buying solutions that assemble disparate product and services components into a meaningful whole that best solves the customer’s problem. Consider the Apple iPad that combines technology with a complete and fully integrated ecosystem of content and software that can be consumed on the device, or the Keurig coffee system that marries convenience with endless varieties of coffee.”

In today’s customer-driven economy, it is important for companies to refocus on what the customer really needs, not just what companies want to sell. When done right, SAVE and the 4 P’s/7P’s together can drive tremendous success for both B2B and B2C companies. Email your comments to:

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