P2P - Marketing is all about people!

Most of you are probably aware that B2B means Business to Business marketing. But you may not be familiar with P2P, which means People to People marketing. Today we are moving rapidly from B2B to P2P.

Few things affect a company's brand as much as the employees. Let's face it - customers don't trust a company, they trust people in the company. Richard Branson says this over and over agin and Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify says it. Actually we don't have to make it any harder than that. The company´s brand is put to test in every contact with the employees. Today it's about P2P marketing in every aspect.

Many companies work with reputation management to deal with their reputation through different situations. But they often forget that it's the individuals who creates the reputation of a company. Reputation management on an individual level will be vital in the years to come. And this is of course where P2P marketing comes into the picture. The international PR-company Kreab & Gavin Anderson puts it like this: "individual reputation will become a dominant factor in the future".

Your professional reputation on an individual level will determine whom your customers will listen to and whom they will trust. Consider this: 90 percent of the decisions made about you by your customers are made when you are not present. The "only" thing that is present is your professional reputation. You could take your chances or you could take control.

So when it comes to P2P marketing - do you know what story your professional reputation is delivering? Storytelling is one of the most underrated tools in business. Today, as an individual, it's not enough to tell a good story, you also have to be one. But it's no longer enough to be a good story, you have to be able to tell it. Today your message spreads in new ways and P2P marketing will give you a competitive advantage. Companies that grow more than 15 percent a year do it because the employees inspire the customers.

But this will also put new demands on every individual. What we should be aware of is that average is over. For some strange reason the mindset of "good enough" has been widely accepted, but this is in my opinion a fundamentally wrong way of thinking. Instead we should have the ambition to be the best. Think for a moment what demands you put on a pilot or a heart surgeon - personally I don't want someone that is just "good enough" - I want the best. But do we put the same demands on ourselves in our professional lives, or do we settle for just "good enough". Or as Tom Peters puts it: "Excellence is not an aspiration, it's the next five minutes." This is profound