The Six Ps Of Marketing
In our marketing classes, we learned about the first five Ps of marketing: Product, Promotion, Price, Place, and Positioning. My professors told me that sometimes People and Packaging are dropped in on a whim, but I need to write my B-School a letter and ask for my money back, because the Internet and mobile data markets have proven that the five Ps are more likely Porn, Porn, Porn, Porn, and…uh…Porn. I laughed in 2000 when I saw my first mobile porn from a company out of the UK called WapMonkey, which offered highly pixelated, 2cm squared, black-on-green images of women, but the technology has steadily improved the rendering of these shapely subjects, and this story from RCR Wireless News looks at the overall growth of the fringe Adult market in the wireless sector. For carriers, the Adult segment poses some challenges: carriers want desperately to profit from the traffic and content, without seemingly participating in the denigration of 52% of society (or 0% or 100% depending on your morals). However, how can the carriers distance themselves from the content they offer, when they also try to keep such tight reign on the content through their “walled gardens”. Dumb pipes like your Internet ISP can claim they’re just passing bits, but carriers who catalog the content, then gain by it’s specific purchase should not be allowed to claim innocence. I’m not for or against porn, but I am against duplicity – you can’t distance yourself from something you control.
