Did you ever count the marketing Ps in your last strategy deck? We keep opening decks with seven of them, sometimes eight, occasionally a set of Cs or Es instead. Mark Ritson once built a satirical Four P Regenerator to mock the pattern and called the update attempts embarrassing. He is right. And the damage runs deeper than embarrassment.

The 4Ps did not fall out of fashion. They were buried, one new letter at a time. The burial gave organisations a quiet permission to move three of the four decisions somewhere else.

A framework does not get replaced. It gets hollowed out.

Jerry McCarthy published the 4Ps in 1960. Booms and Bitner added People, Process and Physical Evidence in 1981 for service businesses. Lauterborn rewrote the whole set as 4Cs in 1990, from the buyer’s side. Kotler himself has since floated a seven-part version. None of these authors set out to weaken marketing. Each addition made the original look incomplete, and an incomplete framework is easy to hand over piece by piece.

Here is why the original still holds. The 4Ps describe the only four decisions a business makes about a market offering. What to sell. What to charge. Where to make it available. What to say about it. Everything invented since is either a subdivision of one of the four or a rename of all four. Physical evidence is product. Process is place. People are both. The 4Cs are the same four decisions viewed from the customer’s chair, which is useful as a check and useless as a replacement.

Six decades of survival is not sentimentality. It is a sign the model describes something real.

What a blockbuster decides in one room

A Hollywood studio still runs the full mix, and runs it in one sitting. A film gets greenlit as a package. Cast and script are the product. The release date and the window strategy across cinema, streaming and physical formats are the place. Prints and advertising, the P&A budget, is the promotion. Ticket formats, territory pricing and the expected return on production spend are the price. Change one and the other three break. A studio marketing chief with authority over trailers alone would be a curiosity in Hollywood.

Top Gun: Maverick shows the mechanism. Paramount spent roughly 125 million dollars on P&A against a production budget of 170 million (The Numbers). Serious money. And the campaign was not the decision behind the result. Paramount turned down offers from Netflix and Apple and held a 120-day exclusive theatrical window at a moment when the rest of the industry had collapsed to 45 days. The film took 1.49 billion worldwide and around 391 million in profit (Deadline).

Hold on the window and you see all four Ps working together. Tom Cruise shot practical in-cockpit footage built for a large screen, so the product earned the trip to the cinema. The price ladder ran through premium formats and repeat viewing, so the wait paid for itself. Paramount took the decision against its own internal pressure to feed Paramount+ with a hit. No communications department has the standing to make a call like this.

Ratings show the interlock at its cleanest. Tentpoles get engineered to a PG-13 because the arithmetic of ticket price times audience size demands the wider audience. A rating is a product decision taken for a price reason. Nobody asks the campaign team.

Barbie is the case our industry loves to cite as proof of promotion. 145 million to produce, 150 million to market, 1.447 billion worldwide (Variety). Everyone remembers the pink. Fewer people credit the licensing partnerships pushing the brand into categories the film never entered, or the decision to let Greta Gerwig write a script mocking the brand owner. We read a four-P result as a promotion result. Ritson made the same point about Liquid Death. Fame gets credited to the campaign while the product and the economics go unexamined.

One P, split twenty ways

36% of Fortune 500 companies still use the CMO title, down from 49% a year earlier. A marketing leader sits on the executive team or reports to the CEO at 52% of them, down from 58% (Forrester). Marketing budgets sit flat at 7.8% of revenue, with paid media taking the largest single share (Gartner). Tenure at S&P 500 companies averages 4.1 years against 7.6 for chief executives (Spencer Stuart).

The decisions went somewhere. Product sits with product management. Price sits with finance and revenue management. Place sits with sales and e-commerce. Marketing keeps promotion.

And then marketing splits promotion again. SEO, paid social, CRM, lifecycle, PR, influencer, content, brand, each with its own budget line, its own agency and its own dashboard, served by a market of 15,384 martech products (Scott Brinker and Frans Riemersma). One quarter of the discipline, subdivided until nobody owns even the quarter.

This is the state we describe when we say a marketing department has become a communications department. Not a smaller version of marketing. A different job with the old name on the door.

The case against us

Three arguments run the other way, and they deserve a fair hearing.

• Specialization is rational. Programmatic buying, lifecycle automation and search are technically demanding. A generalist who owns everything owns nothing well.
• Pricing sits near finance for good reasons. A marketer demanding pricing authority without a grip on gross margin, elasticity and contribution deserves to lose the argument. Plenty do.
• And the Hollywood image has limits. A film ships once, with a fixed shelf life and no iteration. Software and FMCG reprice continuously and rebuild the product after launch. The studio discipline is partly forced by the format.

All three hold. None of them argues for a marketing function with authority over one P.

Reclaiming the mix is not nostalgia

We are not asking for the org chart of 1995. Reporting lines are the wrong fight and marketing has lost it for twenty years running.

The fight worth having is about the room.

Marketing does not need to own pricing. Marketing needs to be present before pricing gets locked, with a written position on what the price signals, who it excludes and what it does to the brand over three years. The same for the product roadmap and the channel mix. Own the integration, even where you do not own the boxes. Integration here means the four decisions taken against each other, not four campaigns sharing a colour palette.

Here is a test for your next launch. Write down the four decisions and the name of the person who made each one. If your name appears once, you run a communications department.

To sum up: the 4Ps were never disproven. They were diluted by frameworks selling novelty, and the dilution made it easy for organisations to distribute marketing’s decisions across four other functions. Reclaiming the mix is not a longing for better days. It is the difference between a discipline steering the business and a discipline producing the trailer. As the CMO title keeps getting folded into growth and commercial roles, the marketers who last will be the ones showing up to the greenlight meeting without an invitation.