Can successful digital marketing strategies been borne out of the traditional 4 P's marketing mix? Dominic Dunne (pictured below), managing director, Drawbridge UK tells ExchangeWire that, while the marketing itself hasn't changed, marketers' tactics and capabilities have; and the increased access to data and analytics will allow an evolution of marketing concepts.

At the core of traditional marketing are the all-important “4 P’s:” Product, Place, Price, and Promotion. These have been the essential components of marketing textbooks for the past half-century, drilled into the heads of every business or marketing student.

Yet, as we spend an ever-increasing amount of time in digital environments, on a multitude of different devices, the role of the 4 P’s in any marketing strategy diminishes slightly, giving way to a different set of concepts built specifically for the cross-device world: the 4 I’s.

Identity, Interoperability, Insights, and Incrementality are the essential new guidelines that should be at the core of all digital media decisions.

Let’s take a closer look.

Identity: the key to consumer experience

Environments like Facebook, Google, or Amazon offer seamless cross-device experiences for consumers. But, ultimately, brands can’t replicate this experience elsewhere because consumer data is locked behind those walled gardens. Sure, the platforms are great for targeting consumers while they are in the environment. But as soon as a consumer leaves the space, the rest of the internet is highly unpersonalised.

What if those seamless, personalised experiences were possible across the entire internet? What if the consumer relationship was owned by the brands, not the platforms?

Luckily, there is finally a way for brands to recognise consumers and deliver better customer experiences across the internet, outside of those closed platforms, even without logins. Today, enterprises can even leverage first- and third-party data assets to enhance those customer experiences.

Interoperability: gaining access

Every marketer is familiar with the famous LUMAscape eye-charts that list the many vendors in the various segments of marketing technology – across search, social, analytics, advertising, mobile, video, and more.

It’s natural for brands to work with partners across every corner of the LUMAscape in order to get their message in front of the ideal audiences. However, interoperability is key to unlocking seamless collaboration with those partners. The data in the marketing stack needs to be accessible and portable. A brand’s display learnings should be actionable on mobile; and conversion reporting from search should be measured in the same dashboard as conversions from social. The marketer doesn’t benefit from the ecosystem until there’s flow of data between different technologies and partners. Otherwise, fragmentation causes headaches, worse than the ones they’re trying to solve.

To maximise ROI for marketers, tech providers should offer data in a democratised fashion, so the brand owns the consumer relationship and journey, not the platform. Mobile reach and attribution data should not be siloed from desktop data, nor should video audiences be separated from social. To truly understand consumers in today’s multi-screen reality, the data needs to be freely available.

Incrementality: build on success

Meeting the business challenges of brands and driving better results are the goals of every technology provider in the market. Vendors thrive on that. Nothing makes them happier than creating solutions that can power real results for a client.

In the cross-device space, this comes back to proving that every touchpoint a customer has with a brand, regardless of device, should align and build on the messages they’ve previously received. The most effective exposures are those that build sequentially: each touchpoint pulling the consumer one step further along the path to purchase. For example, perhaps your first message, served on a smartphone during the commute, or on desktop at work, introduces your product and educates the consumer. The second exposure, served later that day, say, on a tablet, touts the benefits and enhances your message. The third exposure, seen a few days later on a desktop, shares your call to action, and gets them to engage. This sequential storytelling across devices will gently pull your consumer along the path towards purchase that you’ve built for them.

Insights: how you know it’s working

Reporting is descriptive, insights are prescriptive. Understanding a holistic view of consumer behaviours, across devices, makes your campaign results actionable. What’s the point in marketing if you aren’t measuring success?

Even beyond sales reports and standard advertising metrics, like views and clicks, today’s technology enables advanced measurement of the entire consumer journey across devices, and even into the offline world. Today, it’s possible to watch the path of a consumer who first saw your ad on connected TV, then clicked a link on a tablet, visited a desktop website, and, later, walked into a retailer’s physical store. New attribution models can even assign different weights to each impression, based on when it was served, to show brands how each device played a role in the ultimate conversion.

Pulling the I’s together

It’s been well-documented that device adoption is on the rise globally; and that consumer purchase paths in most verticals occur across several environments – both online and offline. This device proliferation has led to consumer identities being completely fragmented. Marketers are finding it tougher to understand who they’re reaching, and how their marketing mix is impacting their KPIs. While the 4 P’s are still important, we don’t live in a traditional world anymore. If brands incorporate the 4 I’s into their go-to-market strategy, they can make sure their execution is optimised to reach the 21st-century consumer.

Remember, a few decades ago, when One-to-One Marketing was the hot book in Marketing Land? Consider this version 2.0. Because, though marketing hasn’t changed, our tactics and capabilities have. The ultimate idea of the 4 I’s is that, with greater access to data and analytics, companies can analyse and understand customers well enough to bring back the corner-store mentality – but this time at massive scale.