For fifty years or so, give or take a decade or two, business marketing, communications and branding have been directed by the “4 P’s.”

In fact, your marketing and communications education was probably based on it. And more than likely, you’ve used its point of view, if not its tenents, for direction every day of your working life.

It’s been a good ride, hasn’t it? So hey, let’s hear it for the “P”meisters—price, product, place and promotion.

Now let’s forget it.

Why the ride is over
Paradigms are shifting so dramatically they’re turning the venerated “4 P’s” into little more than a supercharged, gyroscopic hamster wheel chock full of frantic, well-coordinated actions that will get you absolutely nowhere.

You might as well have Ed Wood directing the action.

In this new marketplace, your customers and prospects hold most of the power. So your marketing and brand communications are going to have to follow their agenda. (If you’d like to know our take on the direction that agenda is heading, check out the Change section in this site.)

New paradigm, new agenda, new point of view
And increasingly, their agenda will require you to relate to your audience through a bunch of different interactive systems.

These systems (or forums, as we like to call them) include traditional and nontraditional media as well as unique hybrid vehicles that are linked, to one degree or another, to make it easy and desirable for your audience to access your messages. As opposed to being interrupted by them.

Most importantly, these forums run on the interaction of many different multidimensional dialogues. Not on highly controlled traditional marketing monologues.

So business communicators are going to have to change their tune faster than Elvis Costello on Saturday Night Live. (To see how much you may have to change, take an interactivity quiz.

This is not a simple fluff-and-fold situation
Pulling off this change in communications priorities will be as difficult as finding a dry spot on Billy Idol’s futon.

Which means you’ll probably have to adopt a totally different mindset from the classic “4 P’s.” It means changing how to think about business marketing, branding and communications.

Because in this new paradigm, conventional business marketers and communicators will be moths. And the “4 P’s” will be the porch light they’ll be slamming their heads against for another decade or two. Not because it affords any illumination anymore, but because it barely beats eating socks.

Sure, for a while we’re all going to be blustering and bumbling our way through this new marketing age with all the proficiency of Tennessee Tuxedo’s assistant Chummly. But one thing is for sure. A new paradigm requires a new set of marketing imperatives.

So here are five for starters. Yeah, we know. They’re not as simple, zippy and easy to remember as PPPP. But then they’re not related to bodily functions either.