With an increasingly complex business world, a growing global population and the development of new markets, businesses’ marketing activities are arguable one of the key factors to stay competitive. If one examine today’s immense marketing budgets of global firms (CMO Council 2014) together with the developing research and corporate tactics used to penetrate into consumer’s lives, there is no hesitance to argue that this is likely to continue throughout the capitalist west as well as in emerging markets. While monitoring this growth, it is important to analyse current methods of marketing planning, …show more content…
The “4Cs approach”, being a customer centric system, better identify and understand the customer from “realistic” aspects he argued. (Grönroos 1994 p.10) supported this by stating that: “The 4Ps marketing mix variables have no relation to customers and that it makes it relatively void”. More recent studies indicate an “awakening” from corporate leaders realising that getting closer to the customer is increasingly more important for future growth. It is the sheer complexity of the modern world; with consumers faced with extreme amounts of choices, empowered by the convenience of online and mobile forms of interacting globally that suggest the 4Ps to be rather out-dated (PwC 2013). Failing to focus on consumers, for example by relying on the less consumer-based system of the 4Ps, the modern consumer will not be hindered to simply choose another company if its needs are not satisfied. This indicates a strong case for Lauterborn´s argument, as companies who fail to focus on consumers are at risk of loosing customers to their competitors, hence the preference for Lauterborn´s model. Furthermore, a study produced at the University of Twente supported the argument by stating …show more content…
With relation to these changing consumer patterns, one can therefore conclude that the 4Cs system is indeed more effective than the product marketing mix model, as it offers continuous communication with consumer’s dynamic characteristics and therefore aids in retaining customers, which ought to be any business´s ultimate