'From the 4Ps to the 4Fs new pillars of e-marketing: the challenge of managing consumer experiences for the new shopper', by academic collaborator Marc Cortés (MBA 99) (2024)

REPORT

On October 20th, Marc Cortés (MBA 99), academic assistant in ESADE’s Marketing Management Department, gave an exciting talk that challenged the audience’s concept of the digital world and their ability to manage their companies from this viewpoint.

Cortés used a simple, practical exercise to demonstrate that most of the audience, despite regarding themselves as e-managers, still had an analogical mindset: when he showed the audience the image of a smart phone, almost all of them saw merely a telephone. According to Cortés, the new, truly digital generations see smart phones not as a telephone but as a multi-purpose device that also makes phone calls. This slight difference shows that the generations running today’s companies have jumped on the digital bandwagon but still have an analogical outlook: an approach that may cause them to make mistakes when defining the marketing of their companies. Digitalisation does not mean applying new technology to old strategies. Digitalisation is the 4th Industrial Revolution and it has upended the world and companies and their marketing forever.

New marketing for a new era

The director of RocaSalvatella and expert in corporate digitalisation gave plenty examples of the main features of this new marketing that has emerged from the social disruption caused by digitalisation. This marketing is more dynamic because it deals with demanding, connected, busy consumers who have very high expectations as regards portability, availability, immediacy and convenience. This marketing relies more on context because products and messages cannot be controlled by the source and its chosen channels, and can be appropriated by anyone willing to transform and upload them. It is also an experience marketing that targets consumers who want more than just satisfaction and who seek emotions and memories that will make them buy the product again. Finally, this marketing is integrated: it adds cutting-edge technology to traditional products and creates new productions and functions.

From the 4 Ps to the 4 new pillars

Whilst not forgetting the traditional 4 Ps (product, price, promotion and place), digitalisation incorporates four other key concepts into the marketing strategy: flow, functions, feedback and brand loyalty.

Cortés pointed out that it is not enough to merely have a static internet presence, it is essential to create a flow by ensuring that products are active in social media, positioning them in search engines, contextualising points of contact and providing experiences that make consumers good opinion leaders.
Functionality entails the possibility to pinpoint consumer segments better, give them value added and simplicity, place greater emphasis on content than the brand itself, and make consumers feel that they are free to choose without any intermediaries, despite dealing with more intermediaries than ever in fact.

Feedback is another concept that has changed completely: responses can now be immediate and the opinions of consumers and potential customers can be obtained from far more places. Finally, brand loyalty no longer means merely repeat purchases, it means making customers recommend products and create communities that become voluntary sellers. The focus must, therefore, be on data collection, on efficiency, on collaboration and on providing far more than simply selling a product.

Marc’s talk was sprinkled with examples of all these concepts: experiences in the sharing community such as Glovo and Trip4Real; here-and-now customer service at Adolfo Domínguez; and emotional buying apps such as Meencanta. This digitalisation expert infected the audience with his drive to uproot old analogical outlooks and look at the world from a digital viewpoint to find new products and new ways of selling them.

Programme

The ESADE Alumni Aragon Club is pleased to invite you to this talk of the Refresher Programme entitled ''From the 4Ps to the 4Fs new pillars of e-marketing: the challenge of managing consumer experiences for the new shopper'' by Marc Cortés (MBA 99), academic collaborator in ESADE’s Marketing Management Department.

Are there new ways of grasping immediate needs and converting them into business? The answer necessarily means building digitalisation into the company’s DNA.

Digitalisation is having a profound impact on all aspects of society and, therefore, business at a tremendous pace. Traditional customer relations are giving way to the new challenges arising from shifting consumer patterns. In response to this new shopper, companies can implement new types of consumer relations based on four main pillars: how to create user flow, which functions should be provided, how to manage feedback and how to focus on customer loyalty.

By working with a consumer-oriented digital transformation model based on these four main pillars, this workshop will examine how digitalisation can enable marketing executives to tackle the e-marketing challenge.

Marc Cortés

Marc Cortés is an academic collaborator in ESADE’s Marketing Management Department. Strategist, entrepreneur and speaker about the opportunities created by the digital economy. Expert in digital marketing, new e-business models and interactive advertising, Cortés designs strategies to enable companies to exploit the social media and build them into their marketing and communication campaigns.

Interested in the never-ending challenges of the digital environment, Cortés is an analyst of the business opportunities arising from big data and mobile telephony, and he also analyses and creates models about the part consumers play in consumer processes and how to target brands.

Since 1999 he has been a strategic consultant and e-business developer, first at Accenture and then at the Spanish bank La Caixa, helping develop its on-line banking.

An acclaimed columnist and speaker about new e-business models, digital strategy and e-marketing. Author of ‘Iníciate en el Marketing 2.0’ (Netbiblo, 2009), about the use of new e-media in relational marketing and ‘Nanobloging’ (UOC, 2009), the first book in Spanish about this type of communication. He is also the co-author of ‘Del 1.0 al 2.0: claves para entender el nuevo marketing’ (Bubok Publishing, 2009) and ‘Análisis de posicionamiento sectorial en redes sociales’, a methodology published by Roca Salvatella in 2013.

Cortés holds a Degree in Law (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) and an MBA (ESADE), and combines his post as Managing Director of Roca Salvatella with teaching marketing and e-business in ESADE’s Marketing Management Department.