The Four Ps of Mar­ket­ing – Prod­uct, Price, Place and Pro­mo­tion – have arguably been an indus­try cor­ner­stone since North­west­ern busi­ness school pro­fes­sor Philip Kotler first includ­ed them in his book, Prin­ci­ples of Mar­ket­ing, in 1967. But, like fash­ion and social norms, times and think­ing change.

At Ad Age’s dig­i­tal con­fer­ence last month, Jen­nifer Kat­tula, head of mar­ket­ing at Atlas, Facebook’s online adver­tis­ing ser­vices sub­sidiary, described the Four Ps as “a set of con­trol­lable fac­tors [mar­keters] can use to influ­ence a buyer’s response.”

As any Mad Men fan knows, even though mar­ket­ing has changed dra­mat­i­cal­ly since 1967, this set of con­trol­lable fac­tors is still desir­able for mod­ern-day mar­keters.

But while the Four Ps put pow­er firm­ly in the hands of mar­keters, the cur­rent envi­ron­ment – with cus­tomer choice and screens aplen­ty – calls for a new mar­ket­ing frame­work to address what Kat­tula said isn’t work­ing with the Four Ps any­more.

In fact, she said the Four Ps have actu­al­ly evolved into the Four Cs.

1. Product Is Now Choice

This, she said, is because tech­nol­o­gy enables con­sumers to have cus­tomized expe­ri­ences any­where.

In addi­tion, con­sumers have a stag­ger­ing num­ber of prod­uct options. Even a prod­uct cat­e­go­ry like break­fast cere­al has grown to include hun­dreds of choic­es, Kat­tula not­ed.

Ama­zon, too, has grown from 2 mil­lion prod­ucts in 1999 to 54 mil­lion prod­ucts today, she said.

“There’s so much choice, but we still have a finite amount of time to make those choic­es,” Kat­tula said. This means it’s nev­er been more impor­tant for mar­keters to focus on rel­e­van­cy because “we have to make sure every moment mat­ters because time is still finite.”

2. Price Is Now Convenience

With end­less choic­es come a shift relat­ed to price. In oth­er words, there’s more to price now than sim­ply price alone, Kat­tula said.

“Think about end­less choice – there’s no spe­cif­ic mar­ket­ing-defined price point any­more,” she said. “We live in a cul­ture of con­ve­nience and imme­di­a­cy. You can get what­ev­er you want at your feet [and/or] doorstep.”

She uses the exam­ple of Uber, in which con­ve­nience means mobile and with con­sumers spend­ing increas­ing time each day on their mobile devices, it’s even more impor­tant for mar­keters to “be there in the palm of their hands,” Kat­tula said.

3. Place Is Now Cross-Device

Place is no longer nec­es­sar­i­ly where a trans­ac­tion hap­pens, Kat­tula not­ed.

Instead, today, near­ly 25 per­cent of con­sumers use three devices every day and that fig­ure jumps to an aver­age of five con­nect­ed devices when you look at 13- to 24-year-olds. Some esti­mates say the aver­age con­sumer will use 10 con­nect­ed devices in 2020, she said.

“The world is going to get a lot more com­pli­cat­ed,” Kat­tula said.

In addi­tion, more than 40 per­cent of con­sumers begin brows­ing on one device and fin­ish shop­ping on anoth­er, which means brands need to be pre­pared to reach con­sumers across devices.

4. Promotion Is Now Creative Sequencing

Final­ly, Kat­tula said the order in which brands tell their sto­ries to con­sumers mat­ters, as well as the for­mat they tell their sto­ries in and the cre­ative they use to tell those sto­ries.

The solu­tion to tying every­thing togeth­er is what Kat­tula calls “peo­ple-based mar­ket­ing,” in which a mar­keter has a sin­gle uni­fy­ing key – like gen­der or geo­graph­ic loca­tion that is per­sis­tent and sta­ble over time – and which rep­re­sents a real per­son and can span across devices, plat­forms, and pub­li­ca­tions.

“Once you under­stand who peo­ple are, you can pro­vide choice and deliv­er high­ly tar­get­ed, super-rel­e­vant ads and you can deliv­er those ads on mobile phones in the palms of their hands and across devices and you can sequence the cre­ative,” Kat­tula said.

What’s your take on the Four Cs?