These four representatives of operational marketing form the best-known term in our discipline, The Marketing Mix. Know the personality traits of each one of them.
Despite its shortcomings, abundant criticism and recent attacks, such as that of converting his 4 P's to 4 C's, Jerome MaCarthy's Theory has remained valid through time. You can be against it, favoring some other classification of activities, but your Marketing Mix has the greatest practical and academic utility within the context of Marketing Management.
Together with Dr. Salvador Garza González, with whom I do a team teaching at EGADE at Tecnológico de Monterrey, we decided that in order for the master's students to understand better and be able to successfully apply theory to practice, we could convert the 4 P's in characters that will actively participate during our Marketing Strategy course.
The main problem to solve was to choose a theory of personality that lent itself to giving life to such unique characters. We settled on Russel L. Ackoff and James R. Emshoff.
It is convenient to specify the main aspects of his theory, developed in the mid-1970s at the Wharton School under the auspices of the Anheuser-Bush Brewery, Inc. A very accessible version is in Ackoff's book, 'The Art of Problem Solving'.
Ackoff and Emshoff developed this theory of personality to use it as a basis for a study on the reasons why people consume alcoholic beverages, with very encouraging results that are applicable, especially, to the development and evaluation of advertising messages for the brands of the company. company that sponsored them.
The theory emerges from the one in which Carl G. Jung exposes his typology of introverted and extroverted individuals, which are actually just two of the possible personality types that emerge from an analysis of the relationship that exists between an individual and the environment around you.
The traits identified by Jung have to do with the sensitivity that someone has of the environment around him, that is, the degree to which the individual is influenced by external stimuli.
An objectified person is one who responds even to the weakest stimuli around him; while a subject-diverse responds little, even in the face of important stimuli from the environment; rather, it responds to your own thoughts, feelings, and beliefs.
The objective person appreciates minute details of others, from their clothes to their feelings; she is easily distracted by what is going on around her and tends to act according to circumstances. The subject-diverse tends to disconnect from her surroundings, practically ignores others and tends to act according to her own plans, without improvising.
Ackoff and Emshoff add that the degree to which the individual influences the environment around him must also be taken into account. An internalizer is an individual who prefers to adapt to circumstances and solve problems by modifying their own behavior. An outsourcer prefers to act to modify the environment around him.
In a room that is cold, the internalizer will put on a coat, while the externalizer will turn on the heat. The latter tends to form groups and lead them; the first, tends to be part of them and follow it.
These four characteristics are tendencies, since the same person can act in all four ways under different circumstances, although tending towards one of the types of behavior more than the other three.
By combining both dimensions of relationship with the environment, four personality types are obtained, of which two correspond to those that Jung names introverts (internalizing subjectiverse) and extroverts (externalizing objectiverse). In fact, these profiles have the lowest incidence, while people with mixed features are the easiest to find.
The following table shows the 4 personality types and in parentheses the term with which Ackoff and Emshoff refer to the type of consumer of alcoholic beverages that corresponds to them.
For the four variables of operational marketing, which we have named according to their main activity, we would have the following table.
Proservia, the representative of the products and services, is a 40-year-old, big and serious aunt. This results from their internal vision, by the requirements of the production process or the provision of services. She is introverted, but very dutiful and helpful; She is austere, but very committed and involved. She is serious in her dealings and very conducive to establishing and developing a one-to-one relationship with her client.
Logicia, the representative of logistics and distribution, is Proservia's sister and also in her forties, big and serious. It is objective, in that it responds to the requirements that the environment poses to its distribution task, and introverse, given its obligation to solve them with an internal vision of the company's efficiency. It is calculating, balanced, structured, mathematical, exact, and deterministic. And at the same time, it is inventory, usher, delivery person, marketer and shelf.
Precious, the representative of the price, is a young and cheerful niece, in her twenties. She is elastic, flirtatious, voluptuous and fickle; glowing. At the same time, it is loving and achievable.
Publicia, his cousin, also young and cheerful, is the representative of the promotion. Nobody is more outgoing than her, who is also modern, imaginative and innovative. She's always 'cool', she's a spark and she's very dynamic, communicative and talkative.
This personality profile not only corresponds to the task they carry out within the companies, but also to the way they intervene during the development of our course, since they come to life through animation and voice to interact with the teachers.
I am sure that by assigning a specific personality to each P we can achieve three objectives: at a conceptual level, to understand them better; at the procedural level, use them correctly and at the attitudinal level, appreciate them more.
