Does Your Strategy Drive Value When You Need It Most?

Product, Price, Placement and Promotion are the timeless "4 P's" of marketing. The 4 P's are enough for marketing products sold via the traditional sales funnel, but are inadequate for driving the information-savvy interactions that now dominate B2B products and services. Services and "whole product" considerations are swelling in importance and increasingly drive purchase decisions even for traditional products.

We encourage an inquisitive and service-oriented culture committed to creating customer value as the focus of every interaction. Instigation, Innovation, Integration and Implementation represent the four types of potential value created during company-customer interactions. Adapting work done by GE CMO Beth Comstock over the past decade, we model this approach during each of our engagements, making it the focus of our strategic marketing plans and encouraging our clients to instill it in their corporate culture.

  1. Instigation - Challenge the status quo

  2. Innovation - Seek out marketplace insights

  3. Integration - Build bridges internally and externally

  4. Implementation - Execute ideas and plans

Services firms understand this intuitively, but frequently lack a solid framework for repeatability.

Getting there is both easier and harder than you might think. Easier, because thinking in terms of interactions naturally guides you toward appropriate actions. Harder, because you may need to implement cultural and management changes in order to shift thinking from transactions to interactions. As you might expect, organizations with an existing, strong customer-focused culture accomplish the transition more easily.

Our success is complete when you have a strategy that engages your customers in asking the question, "Now what?"