Stairway to Heaven....Man.

One of my favorite SNL sketches is the one where Eddie Murphy claims to be Clarence, the fifth Beatle. To substantiate his claim, Clarence offers a tape of Beatles songs with an added sax track and the word “man” after “she loves you”, supposedly proving that the original song was “She Loves You, Man.” He then plays the track backwards and you hear Paul McCartney say “Hey George, lets kick Clarence out of the band and steal all his good ideas.”

Some say if you play “Stairway to Heaven” backwards you will get a special evil message, a situation which Robert Plant denies. However, Plant did have a horrid solo career with its pinnacle in the release of “Tall Cool One,” so anything he says is immediately suspect.

“Stairway to Heaven” was not the first song I learned on guitar. It was the second. Actually, I only knew the first few notes, but I could play them with unmatched precision. I could also play “Iron Man” with power chords and a particularly terrible rendition of Guns N’ Roses “Patience.” “Stairway” is one of those songs that have drifted upward to a stratosphere of music beyond reproach. It’s not cool to say you don’t like “Stairway to Heaven.” If you don’t like it, follow your mother’s advice and don’t say anything at all.

In everything lies a “Stairway to Heaven.” In everything, there are things you just don’t question, critique or try to add to. You would never question the ingredients of my Great-Uncle Carl’s Brunswick stew lest you will be shamed with a steamy pile of country insults that sound like compliments but are veiled jabs. To tell Carl that his Brunswick stew is missing something is, in essence, to recommend adding a saxophone part to “Stairway to Heaven.” The marketing equivalent of “Stairway to Heaven” is the four P’s, which are relentlessly beaten into the head of young marketing students until they are recited like the lyrics to “Whole Lotta Love.”

Product, Price, Place and Promotion have become houses of the holy, and while some contend that such structure is unfortunately what is and what should never be, that leaves strategists dazed and confused as they to reconcile today’s initiatives with yesterday’s constraints. I suggest that the communication breakdown is because a lack of flexibility has made a time tested system a real heartbreaker for contemporary marketers.

Before you take a look at the four P’s and ramble on, might I suggest that your time is going to come and you will tell me thank you if you simply do the unthinkable and add a saxophone to marketing’s “Stairway to Heaven.” Well that, and play it in reverse.


What is missing from the four P’s (the sax, part so to speak) is the customer experience. Too often, we marketers assume the customer experience without truly delving into a customer’s interaction with a product or service. As product commoditize, we can no longer expect customers to adapt to a speculative experience. I know in suggesting the customer experience should be added to the four P’s that I’m messing with the way things have always been done. I know I’m adding a sax part to a classic, but it just plain sounds better.

Play the “Stairway to Heaven” of marketing in reverse and you’ll get a much better result. Here’s the first note.

1) Customer experience.

How will the customer interact with the product and message on practical and emotional levels? Is the design such that customers feel the desire to accessorize with it? Is there an essence of trust about the product, and if not, can we add it?

The customer experience is the realm in which products and service now find themselves competing. You can have two products with nearly identical attributes, but the one which by design, promotion or essence leans more towards creating a more succinct and desirable experience for the customer will win every time.

2) Promotion.

Sure. I can hear your thoughts from where I’m sitting. I am a consultant concerned with how to adequately promote things; therefore, I’m moving promotion to a top spot.

Untrue.

It seems that products are often proposed without the slightest hint of how they can or will be promoted for sale. That’s dumb. Honestly, a company should know how a product will be communicated and received by consumer far before the design is finished. And no, this is not an R&D thing. If the marketing department faces the daily task of connecting with consumers, then the marketing department should be able to impart some of that consumer and promotional insight into the product before it goes to production.

3) Place

The shelves are getting crowded, and unless there is a super-super-store format around the corner, I suggest not holding your breath for a door-busting miracle. Why would any company consider developing a product without having a clear channel of how to get it to customers? It seems that many companies are content to develop something new and find distribution after the fact. As distributing channels get choked with the hordes of products available these days, the successful products of the future will appreciate not only what they give to consumers but how they give it to consumers.

4) Price

I do not want to give the impression that pricing strategy is not important. It is. It’s not that I believe pricing strategy is not a strategy, I just don’t believe it is an entire strategy. Yet every holiday season the airwaves are full of door busters, one day sales and special secret items sales. In the end customers with zero brand loyalty are attracted to specials from which waning profitability turns “black Friday” into “deep in the red Friday.”

Instead of price, we need to think about value. How are we creating value for the consumer and how does the value relate to the cost? We can slash prices or raise value. I’m going with value.

5) Product.

After we ask question about what the experience is that consumers want and we provide; after we think deeply about what attributes a product should have to create promotion which is memorable and spurs action; after we spec the distribution channels to find a congruent way to get our product out there; after we get a solid price which accounts for all it will take to pull this off right…

We have the product.

So why should product people listen to marketing people? I’ll answer with a story.

While I was teaching a class, a group of bright young lads and lasses came to me with an amazing concept: an iPod for older people. The promotion was beautiful. Outlines of grannies on the now famous bright backgrounds. TV commercials with the heavy beat tracks replaced with big band, jazz and my favorite, audiobooks. This whole campaign was wrapped up in the concept of getting “your” iPod.

I put my giddiness aside and said, “This is awesome! What features will it have?”
“Features?” they asked. “It’s a regular iPod.”
“That’s stupid,” I nicely critiqued.

Wanting to play the old marketing song backwards does not mean listening to it all alone. What my young learners had not appreciated is that while the consumer pull might have existed, they should have been considering what R&D could have done to drive the message home. Marketing had identified the niche but it would be a product solution that would get things moving together. One student in the class came up to me with the answer: make the letters bigger on the screen.

No big deal. No fundamental reengineering. No overhaul. Just finding a way in the software to make the numbers and letters bigger so that we could back up the claim of “your” iPod.

Those young students had a lesson for me and all of us that day. We need to listen to the consumer and work backwards in developing seamless rollouts. We need to communicate between departments to make sure that we play from the same playbook and sing from the same songbook.

For many of us, the challenges and opportunities that today’s marketplace offers will give clear routes to our customers’ desires, and the prospect for success sounds pretty good. For those who refuse to look or listen another way, the prospect is bleak and, sadly, the song remains the same.


Snowden Tatarski is a brand consultancy based in Athens, Georgia that focuses on the development and implementation of the whole brand experience. The agency offers marketing research, marketing strategies, advertising creative development, media strategy and planning, sales consultation and the production of advertising, sales collateral, broadcast and interactive systems and materials. Information online at www.sn-ta.com