The 4Ps of Marketing, With Examples (and the Right Order)

The idea of a "marketing mix" goes back to Neil Borden, an advertising professor at Harvard, in the 1950s (American Marketing Association). E. Jerome McCarthy sorted the mix into four Ps in his 1960 textbook, Basic Marketing. Sixty-odd years on, the four boxes are taught in every introductory course, and used in the wrong order in plenty of businesses.

What are the 4Ps of marketing?

The four decisions every offer needs, shown here with a chai stall outside an office park in Ahmedabad:

Product: what you sell, including everything the buyer experiences with it. For the stall, that is cutting chai, a few snacks, and a cup handed over in under a minute.
Price: what the buyer pays, and what that price says. A small cup at a low price says "daily habit", not "treat".
Place: where and when the buyer can get it. Outside the office gate at 4pm, when the meetings end, is most of this stall's strategy.
Promotion: how the buyer hears about it and why they choose it. A hand-painted board, a regular who brings colleagues, the smell of ginger at twenty paces.

Each P is a decision, not a department. Change one and the others usually have to move.

What is the right order for the 4Ps?

Product, then price, then place, then promotion. Each decision constrains the next. You can't price what you haven't defined. Where you sell depends on what you sell and what it costs. And promotion can only describe decisions that have already been made.

Trouble starts when the order runs backwards, with the campaign planned first and the product, price and channel bent to fit it later. If the stall printed flyers before choosing its spot, the flyers would name the wrong street. When marketing feels busy without results, check the first three Ps before spending more on the fourth.

4Ps vs 7Ps: what is the difference?

The 7Ps add three for services, where the buyer can't inspect the product before paying: people, process and physical evidence. They were proposed by Bernard Booms and Mary Jo Bitner in 1981. For a services business like ours, those three are most of the product: the people who do the work, the process (what happens in week one), and physical evidence (a case study you can read, a free tool you can try).

4Ps vs 4Cs

In 1990 Robert Lauterborn proposed four Cs that look at the same decisions from the buyer's side: consumer (instead of product), cost (instead of price), convenience (instead of place) and communication (instead of promotion). They are a useful check. If you can't describe a P as the matching C, you have made a decision the buyer won't feel.

Questions

Who created the 4Ps of marketing?

E. Jerome McCarthy introduced the four Ps in his 1960 textbook Basic Marketing, building on Neil Borden's idea of the marketing mix. Philip Kotler's textbooks later made them the standard way to teach marketing strategy.

Are the 4Ps of marketing still relevant?

Yes, as a checklist of decisions. The model is old, but the questions aren't: what are we selling, for how much, where, and how will people hear about it? Digital channels changed the answers to place and promotion, not the need to decide them.

What is an example of the 4Ps?

The chai stall above: the product is fast cutting chai, the price signals a daily habit, the place is the office gate at 4pm, and the promotion is a board and word of mouth. Each decision supports the others, which is what makes a mix work.

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