Marketing Plan for Monster based on the 4Ps Marketing Plan for Monster.com

Monster's business model and go-to-market strategies are continually striving to create disruptive innovation by redefining the economics of online recruitment and career advice. Of the many factors behind the sites' success, the orchestration of the four Ps of marketing including product (or in the case of Monster, a service), pricing, promotion and distribution or place have continually been fine-tuned to increase the advertising value of the site while ensuring employers find valuable candidates.

Evaluating Monster's Product and Services Strategy

Monster was the first recruitment website to provide a depth and breadth of personalization and customization that rivals Amazon in sophistication and ease of use (Burnsed, 2010). Like Amazon, Monster realized early in their history as a company that the continual development and launch of innovative services for both advertisers and job seekers would ensure continually increasing traffic rates to the site over time (Leader-Chivee, Hamilton, Cowan, 2008).

Early in their history Monster also realized that creating innovative services by each stage of the career lifecycle someone was in would be disruptive and very profitable as well (Burnsed, 2010). By concentrating on a lifecycle-based approach to creating and quickly launching services, Monster was able to successfully build online communities, many with over 100,000 members, which also served as a foundation of their advertising and marketing strategies. These communities concentrate on the needs of job applicants for resume-writing advice, support in finding references and creating their own job search strategies. From a product strategy standpoint, creating and updating content on these communities led to further loyalty and commitment to using the site by job seekers across all age categories. The selective use of content at Monster by stage of career cycle significantly increased long-term loyalty and was instrumental in the site continually gaining 3.6M visitors on a regular basis. This volume of traffic ensured their...

Launching the Skills Auction site on July 4, 1999 and seeing the enrollment pass 12,000 by March, 2000 including 161,000 registered independent contractors quickly validated this business model as well. By 2000 this service was averaging 40,000 auctions per day with a commission of $1,000 for each match made. Monster unified all of these services with an intuitive, easily customized user interface design each visitor to the site could tailor to their specific preferences. Going forward, this integration of services needs to be more finely-tuned to skills assessments to ensure job seekers gain valuable guidance eon how to organize and complete their job search online. The greater the success of the job seeker, the higher the level of advertising rates possible due to repeat traffic and word-of-mouth referrals as well.
Pricing Strategy

The strategic pricing practice of Monster needs to concentrate on the value delivered to advertisers, increasing rates by stage of the career lifecycle a given position falls into. This approach to strategic pricing concentrates more on the value of finding very specific candidates for hard-to-fill positions. The value of finding a chemical engineer with fifteen years of experience, an MBA from a top university, who knows refining and has global expertise is an example. That's not the kind of position you run an ad in the local newspaper for over a weekend. By concentrating on the career lifecycles of professionals, Monster could first find these specific prospects through data mining and analysis, and then focus on selling this data through field sales for much more than the average order size of $100,000. Using data mining and analytics, Monster could define the specific profiles of these valuable prospects and charge a premium for the service of at least 25%. This would have a corresponding direct effect on gross margins as well. With 60% of sales being generated…