This paper presents a marketing plan analysis for Monster.com, examining how the company applied the four Ps of marketing — product, pricing, promotion, and place — to establish itself as a leading online recruitment platform. The paper evaluates Monster's lifecycle-based product strategy, its personalized user experience, and the Skills Auction service as examples of disruptive innovation. It also assesses pricing recommendations tied to data mining and analytics, promotional campaigns such as the Super Bowl "When I Grow Up" ad, and the site's distribution strategy as a trusted career advisor. The paper concludes with recommendations for integrating social media to remain competitive.
Monster's business model and go-to-market strategies continually strive to create disruptive innovation by redefining the economics of online recruitment and career advice. Among the many factors behind the site's success, the orchestration of the four Ps of marketing — including product (or, in Monster's case, a service), pricing, promotion, and distribution — has been continually fine-tuned to increase the advertising value of the site while ensuring employers find qualified candidates.
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 its history that the continual development and launch of innovative services for both advertisers and job seekers would ensure steadily increasing traffic to the site over time (Leader-Chivée, Hamilton, & Cowan, 2008).
Early on, Monster also recognized that creating innovative services tailored to each stage of the career lifecycle would be both disruptive and highly profitable (Burnsed, 2010). By concentrating on a lifecycle-based approach to creating and quickly launching services, Monster was able to build successful online communities — many with over 100,000 members — which also served as the foundation for its advertising and marketing strategies. These communities addressed the needs of job applicants seeking resume-writing advice, help finding references, and guidance in developing their own job search strategies. From a product strategy standpoint, creating and updating content within these communities fostered loyalty and commitment among job seekers across all age groups. The selective use of content by career cycle stage significantly increased long-term loyalty and was instrumental in the site consistently attracting 3.6 million visitors. This volume of traffic ensured that Monster's advertising-based business model was viable for the long term and capable of scaling into a multichannel marketing service.
Product line extensions were also very successful. The launch of the Skills Auction site on July 4, 1999 saw enrollment surpass 12,000 by March 2000, including 161,000 registered independent contractors, quickly validating this business model. By 2000, the service was averaging 40,000 auctions per day with a commission of $1,000 for each successful match. Monster unified all of these services with an intuitive, easily customized user interface that each visitor could tailor to their specific preferences. Going forward, this integration of services needs to be more finely tuned to skills assessments so that job seekers receive meaningful guidance on how to organize and complete their job search online. The greater the success of the job seeker, the higher the advertising rates possible, driven by repeat traffic and word-of-mouth referrals.
Monster's strategic pricing approach needs to concentrate on the value delivered to advertisers, increasing rates according to the career lifecycle stage of a given position. This approach focuses more on the value of locating very specific candidates for hard-to-fill roles. Finding a chemical engineer with fifteen years of experience, an MBA from a top university, expertise in refining, and a global background is a prime example — that is not the kind of position filled by a weekend ad in a local newspaper. By concentrating on the career lifecycles of professionals, Monster could identify these specific prospects through data mining and analysis and then sell this data through field sales at well above the average order size of $100,000. Using analytics, Monster could define precise profiles for these high-value prospects and charge a premium of at least 25%, which would have a corresponding positive effect on gross margins.
With 60% of sales being generated through telesales and an average order size of just $3,000, Monster could also apply analytics-driven pricing to smaller accounts. What is currently missing from their pricing strategy is the ability to clearly define and quantify the greater long-term value they deliver to clients.
Just like its core business model, Monster has always been focused on being a disruptive force in its promotional plans and strategies. From an initial $50,000 spent on radio advertising in Boston to launch the company, to committing 15% of its 1999 budget of $32 million to a single 30-second Super Bowl spot, Monster has consistently challenged the status quo. This disruptive brand building centered on the "When I Grow Up" campaign, which reminded Super Bowl XXXIII viewers that it was never too late to pursue their dreams. Additional promotional efforts included the use of a blimp to further differentiate the brand and rise above market noise. All of these strategies proved effective: the company achieved 92% recognition among HR professionals globally.
Building on these strengths, Monster needs to accelerate promotional strategies that incorporate social media platforms, including LinkedIn (Silliker, 2011) and Facebook (O'Reilly, 2011), so that the brand remains relevant to the latest generation of job seekers. As noted in the product strategy discussion, Monster excels at defining services across each stage of a person's career lifecycle. Promotional strategies should follow the same logic — concentrating on the most salient factors at each career stage and crafting messaging appropriate to each audience segment. Regardless of career stage, all promotional efforts must also prioritize social media in order to stay in step with the evolving habits of applicants (O'Reilly, 2011) while also attracting new advertisers and corporate clients.
The distribution and place aspect of Monster is one of the most competitive within the recruiting industry, generating 6 million visitors globally on an annual basis. It has also established itself as a dominant competitor to all forms of print media used in recruiting and job placement. What Monster offers over its many classes of competitors — including print media, temporary staffing firms, and retained search firms — is the ability to provide any user, at no charge, a completely customized online experience. It has also developed the capability to analyze a candidate's strengths and provide targeted career advice. All of these elements further solidify Monster's role as a trusted advisor for those seeking to begin or advance a career.
"Super Bowl campaign and social media integration"
"Online distribution and social media enrichment"
Silliker, A. (2011, September). Recruiters connect via LinkedIn. Canadian HR Reporter, 24(16), 2.
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