The Fifth P in Marketing: People

You probably know the 4Ps of marketing: product, price, place, and promotion. But there’s one more P that’s critical in creating a great brand—people.

You can have a useful product, a ripe market, a killer marketing plan, and a strong brand to command a premium price. But if you don’t have the right people in place to deliver on your brand promise, everything will fall apart. Especially as organizations are quickly turning to AI, the role of people in managing authentic brands has never been more important.

Meta learned this hard lesson last year when it introduced new AI chatbots intended to make online shopping easier. But because they didn’t slow down to add in safety guardrails or listen to warnings from staff about risks, they ended up rolling out a service that delivered inappropriate content to minors. The company faced legal backlash and harmful damage to the brand, which had lost consumer trust.

How can the rest of us learn from this brand failure? By realizing that people do and always will play a vital role in shepherding brand experiences. Here are three ways marketing can support the people needed to build and grow a strong brand.

Leadership alignment

Brand success starts at the top with strong leaders who are committed, accountable, and steadfast to a strong moral compass. If you want to have a resilient brand, make sure your leadership is aligned with your brand promise. Smart companies have CMOs who make sure this is a reality by engaging the full leadership team in consensus building around brand values, providing brand training to all leaders, and doing regular brand workshops to listen, learn, and keep the brand on track from the top down.

Hiring and onboarding

One of the best ways to make sure your employees are living your brand is to make it a consistent part of the hiring and onboarding process within your organization. As marketers, you can provide your HR team with useful tools that will help them set employee expectations, provide brand training, and share brand stories with incoming staff. These efforts will not only build brand consistency, they will also help create a team of brand advocates from the inside out.

Employee culture building

Organizations with thriving brands that can weather changing markets, evolving customer needs, and new technology shifts generally have thriving cultures. Marketing can support company culture with employee branding efforts that include targeted communications and consistent brand experiences. Take time to celebrate and share stories of employees who lived the brand by being adaptable, creative, and working with integrity. This will build morale, illustrate the importance of people in your work, and empower employees to continue to play the important role of brand ambassadors.