NEW YORK: Marketers that want to succeed in the e-commerce world could benefit from paying attention to the “4Cs” as much as the traditional “4Ps”, a study has argued.

The CMO Council, the executive network, partnered with eBay Advertising to survey almost 200 brand custodians in early 2018, as well as conducting in-depth interviews with several leading marketers.

An essential priority, the analysis suggested, will involve reassessing the classic “4Ps” of product, price, place and promotion.

“With the reinvention of retail comes the opportunity to reclaim and even redefine the Ps, identifying ways that marketing-led initiatives across the customer journey are boosting engagements and opening routes to revenue,” the report stated. (For more, read WARC’s in-depth report: How brands respond to the look-alike-and-disappear e-commerce challenge.)

Instead, the study proposed “4Cs” that may be a more useful formula to consider: “This is the opportunity to innovate across customer attraction, convenience, conversion and consistency of experience.

“These are also the ways that global e-commerce communities are built from the ground up: by setting the pace of service, delivery and opportunity and embracing the role that the consumer plays in advancing the marketplace.”

Another recommendation was based around the convergence of “content, commerce and customer” – a process that requires marketers to develop platform-specific material.

“They must shift their thinking away from a linear approach of developing content and experiences for sites that sell, sites that inform and sites that stimulate,” the study said.

“Communities now sit at the point of convergence, where content that is most contextual and relevant to the customer is driving more profitable commerce interactions.”

Equally important is looking beyond the path to purchase, but instead to adopt a “deep and broad view of the customer” that can help brands construct compelling but relative narratives.

“It must … include intelligence that can be gathered about their lives, the drivers of change and what will differentiate a moment of delight from a boring transaction,” the study argued.

Sourced from WARC