Lauterborn's 4Cs
Lauterborn's 4Cs rewrites the 4Ps from the customer's side of the counter - Product becomes Customer, Price becomes Cost, Place becomes Convenience, Promotion becomes Communication - forcing you to check whether the marketing plan actually looks that way from outside.
Swap in Customer, Cost, Convenience and Communication and the same four boxes read completely differently.
Reach for this when…
- Your marketing plan is built entirely around your product features.
- You keep losing sales to a competitor with a worse product but an easier buying experience.
- Messaging hasn't changed since the business looked different than it does now.
How to run it
- Customer: define who you're actually serving now, not who you assumed.
- Cost: work out the total cost to the customer, not just your price.
- Convenience: map how easy it actually is to find, buy and use what you sell.
- Communication: check the message speaks to that customer, in language they use.
A worked example
Situation. Oyun Bat runs Steppe Textiles, a cashmere retailer in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, whose marketing still spoke to tourists browsing a market stall years after most sales had moved online.
Applied. Working the 4Cs: the real Customer was now a remote-working professional buying for warmth and quality, not a souvenir. Convenience meant adding WhatsApp ordering and clear sizing guides; Communication dropped 'finest Mongolian cashmere' for care instructions and fit advice.
Result. Online returns fell and repeat orders rose, because the buying experience finally matched who was actually buying.
The catch
The 4Cs are a useful mirror but not a plan - they tell you what to check, not what to change it to, and if your customer definition is wrong the other three Cs inherit that error. It also doesn't help much with competitive positioning, which the 4Ps' 'Promotion' partly covered.
If you can describe your Convenience and Communication but not your Customer specifically, you've built the last two Cs on a guess.
Origin: Robert F. Lauterborn