The 7-P Offer Navigator

The marketing mix has been around since Borden and McCarthy, and Booms and Bitner stretched it to seven for services: product, price, place, promotion, people, physical evidence and process. The book repurposes it as the anatomy of an offer. Product and price are the shop window, the two Ps every competitor can see and most will match. The other five are the workshop behind it, and they are also the hardest to copy, because they are made of how your people, your processes and your proof fit together in this account.

Run the seven Ps against your current offer to a key customer and the result is usually lopsided: pages on product, a line on price, and nothing written down at all about people, process or physical evidence, which is where the customer’s actual experience of you lives. That is where causal ambiguity is manufactured, and where offer ideation should spend most of its time.