The 4 Ps of Marketing: A Comprehensive Guide to Building Effective Strategies

A marketing strategy sets the course for your marketing campaign’s success; in fact, when done effectively, it is the driving force behind gaining new customers and retaining existing ones. The factors that determine your marketing strategy is commonly known as the marketing mix.

However, building your strategy requires more than knowing the marketing mix definition. You must have a deep understanding of the factors that you can control — categorized as the 4 Ps. How you control them has a direct impact on your ability to build a powerful strategy. If you want to master the 4 Ps of marketing, you’re in the right place. In this article, we’ll explore how you can make them your weapon of choice in building an effective marketing strategy.

What Are the 4 Ps of Marketing?

Before we define the 4 Ps, it is important to explore the roots of this term and answer the question: what is the marketing mix? The term 'marketing mix' was first used in the 1950s by Neil Borden. However, he did not categorize the marketing mix elements into the 4 Ps.

The term gained true popularity in 1960 when E. Jerome McCarthy published 'Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach.' McCarthy simplified Borden’s more complex marketing mix model into four components:

Product
Price
Place
Promotion

So, what is a marketing mix? Long story short, marketing mix elements refer to a combination of tools that professionals use to achieve their objectives and create effective marketing strategies. When you fully understand each of the components of the marketing mix, product sales can reach all-time highs!

Why the Four Ps of Marketing Are Still Relevant Today

More than half a century later, the term is still actively used today and is considered foundational knowledge in business and marketing. What are the 4Ps of marketing? While they may be redefined or enhanced to accommodate a changing landscape, the principles remain the same. As you’ll see later on, having knowledge of the 4 Ps can help in many aspects of the trade. This includes marketers running a campaign and even business owners who want to enhance sales.

Product: The Core of Your Marketing Strategy

In the 4 Ps of marketing, the product is central to your strategy, and in most cases, it is the first thing that you should consider. Without a high-quality, desirable product, even the best efforts in digital marketing will fall flat in the long run. After all, even if you manage to generate sales during the initial launch, a bad reputation eventually gets around. So, for your first step in the implementation of the 4 Ps of marketing, ask yourself these two questions:

Does the product or service deliver what it promised?
Does it fulfill a need or want in your target market?

If you can confidently answer yes to both, then you can proceed to the next step!

Price: Balancing Value and Profitability

How much should your product cost? Pricing is a highly critical point in implementing a strategy. For this element of the 4 Ps of marketing, you achieve the following.

Establish marketing positioning: For example, premium pricing is ideal for high-end products.
Set the potential profitability: If the prices are too high, the demand may dwindle; however, if they’re too low, you may cut a lot into your margins.
Create customer expectations: Clients will expect more from products that are worth more.

As part of the 4 Ps of marketing, price should not be decided based purely on supply and demand. After all, the willingness to pay is affected by more than just the price tag.

Place: Delivering Your Product to the Right Audience

In real estate, they always talk about the importance of location, location, location. The same goes for marketing. For example, can you imagine selling swimming goggles in the middle of the desert? Place as part of the 4 Ps of marketing can help in ensuring that the offer is accessible to the right target market. Without the right location, even the best product in your industry won’t succeed. Additionally, timing is just as important for this element. If you’re selling ice cream, you’re likely to sell more during a hot summer day because people will want to beat the heat with something sweet.

Your choice of where to place your ads also matters. For example, if your target market doesn’t use LinkedIn, it doesn’t make sense to advertise or build your presence there.

Promotion: Communicating Your Value Proposition

Promotion explains to customers why something is worth buying. Assuming that you’ve done everything correctly for the first three of the 4 Ps, great promotional efforts are practically guaranteed to generate long-term profitability. How you incorporate promotion into your strategy is entirely up to you. This can include advertising, social media, email marketing, audio marketing and anything else that can help you communicate your message. It may be the final element of the 4 Ps of marketing, but promotion is just as important as with the first three Ps.

Advantages of Using the 4 Ps of Marketing to Create Your Strategy

Is it even worth using the 4 Ps? Thanks to its general applicability across industries, we believe that it is! Now, we’re not saying that the 4 Ps of marketing are completely flawless. However, even today, your knowledge of the marketing mix can serve as a solid guide to direct you toward profitability. In the following subsections, we’ll explore the specific advantages of using the 4 Ps of marketing in your strategy. Let’s get started then, shall we?

It Makes It Easier for You to Make Decisions

As a marketer, you understand all too well that there are many moving parts to creating a marketing strategy. Working out how one factor may affect the others can be overwhelming, and this can overcomplicate the strategy creation process. The 4 Ps of marketing can serve as a basic step-by-step guide that will ensure that you’re covering all your bases. By dividing one daunting undertaking — creating a quality strategy — into smaller, more manageable tasks, you’ll be able to focus on one goal at a time.

It Encourages a Deeper Understanding of the Target Market

The 4 Ps of marketing can only be implemented well if you truly understand your target audience. By using them as your guide, you’ll be able to determine where your marketing strategy needs refining before moving forward. For example, let’s say that you’re already on the third “step” in the 4 Ps of marketing: Place. If you’re not sure where best to promote the offer and meet your audience where they are, then you’ll know what component you should revisit in your existing research. In doing so, you’ll have the opportunity to modify your decisions based on your new knowledge.

It Balances the Needs of the Market with Profitability

Proper implementation of the 4 Ps requires considerable market research, ensuring that you thoroughly understand your target market and their needs. This allows companies to align their products, pricing, distribution and promotional efforts with customer demands, creating a strategy that satisfies both the market’s needs and the company’s financial goals. The 4 Ps of marketing help businesses meet (and ideally exceed) the expectations of the audience. As a result, the demand for the offer and even the brand itself will increase naturally.

Integrating the 4 Ps for a Cohesive Marketing Strategy

Talking about the 4 Ps is one thing, but how do you ensure that you’re taking them into account to create a cohesive marketing strategy? That’s what we’ll discuss next. There are many ways to incorporate the 4 Ps, so don’t limit yourself to the suggestions that we include here. Take a look at your existing strategy, and you will see the many ways that the 4 Ps of marketing can fit there.

Align the Features with the Pricing

Since the 4 Ps of marketing don’t exist in a vacuum, consider how the first and the second of the 4 Ps of marketing (Product and Price) are intrinsically linked. In fact, the perceived value of what you are selling should absolutely determine your pricing strategy. For example, say that you want to create an upmarket product. To implement the 4 Ps of marketing cohesively, you need to include features that are considered high-end. If the consumers think that the product doesn’t justify the price, then they will not buy it. Conversely, to avoid shortchanging the potential profitability of a product, the actual price should not be much lower than the perceived value.

Consider How the Product is Different From the Competition

Product differentiation is great for bringing the 4 Ps of marketing together.However, how you will be able to integrate the 4 Ps of marketing will depend on the differentiation that you’re aiming for. Here are just a few ideas for you to consider:

Is the product the most affordable option among the alternatives?
Is it the only item available through a certain distribution channel?
Can you weave a unique story into the product to separate it from the competition?

In the end, it’s important that potential customers see that only you can offer exactly what they’re looking for.

Tailor Promotional Materials Based on Your Strategy

To create a cohesive strategy, your promotional efforts should be aligned with the first three elements of the 4 Ps of marketing (Product, Price, Place). This can mean doing the following:

Creating different ads based on the various segments of your market;
Crafting the messaging based on the differentiation that you want to highlight;
Ensuring the overall “feel” of the promotional material reflects the perceived value that you’re going for.

Of course, as you try to have all the 4 Ps of marketing come together, you should also maintain consistent branding, which brings us to our next point.

Make Sure That Your Chosen Place Complements the Pricing

We love how convenient Walmart’s online shopping site is as much as the next person. But can you imagine seeing a $100,000 ring there? Failing to integrate all the 4 Ps of marketing can cheapen the product and the brand. Where you place the product, whether online or in-store, should reflect its value. If you’re selling a high-end item, then it should be somewhere people expect to find luxury goods. Meanwhile, more affordable products can be placed somewhere accessible for the masses.

Conduct Your Market Research

Irrespective of whether you apply the 4 Ps of marketing, this is something that you should always do. It can help you determine where you can offer value and whether there’s even a demand for the product that you want to develop. Research helps you implement every element in the 4 Ps of marketing by answering the following:

Which features is your target market looking for;
What is the price point they can afford;
Where is it best to promote the product or service;
Which of your targets need to be nurtured, and who is ready to buy.

Apart from a quality offer, market research is the secret weapon to successfully implementing the 4 Ps of marketing. So, before making any major move, ensure that you have this covered.

The 4 Ps of Marketing Reinvented for the Digital Era

With the floodgates of digital marketing completely opened, marketers and business owners have gained a lot more information about their target market. So, the 4 Ps of marketing have been dressed up! Since you can now more closely link outcomes to your activities, it only makes sense to go with a customer-oriented approach. So, instead of relying purely on the 4 Ps of marketing, there are also the 4 Cs to consider: Customer, Cost, Convenience and Communication. Let’s explore each one in the following subsections.

Customer

As it appears in the 4 Ps of marketing, Product is now replaced by Customer in the 4 Cs. The rationale here is that a business owner should be more focused on responding to customer needs than developing a product. But for us, there is no significant difference. While the product — or the offer — is at the heart of the strategy, you are still creating something that will appeal to clients. So, whether you adhere to the 4 Cs or 4 Ps of marketing, you’ll need to perform the same tasks, including market research and product customization.

Cost

With the 4 Ps of marketing, only the price tag is considered. The 4 Cs framework simply shifts the focus to consumer perspective rather than business perspective. Now, what does this mean? Unlike the 4 Ps of marketing, you also look at non-monetary costs, such as:

The foregone opportunity to purchase your product;
The willingness of various segments of your market to pay;
The value delivered compared to the cost.

Using Cost instead of Price allows for a more comprehensive overview of the considerations a consumer makes when buying something. It provides more context and nuance because people consider more than just the price when determining what to buy.

Convenience

Instead of Place as described in the 4 Ps of marketing, the focus is now on Convenience. Essentially, how easy is it for the customer to buy the product or service? This goes beyond the original 4 Ps of marketing, where the focus was simply on promoting the product in the right location. It also considers other aspects of the buying experience, such as:

Customer support accessibility pre- and post-purchase;
Seamless purchasing experience, including quick delivery of physical products;
Easy access to the offer, whether online or through physical outlets.

With these, potential customers will have an easier time accessing the product.

Communication

The Promotion aspect of the 4 Ps of marketing is one-directional: it sees customers as being on the receiving end while the brand does all the talking. However, by implementing Communication from the 4 Cs, there’s an understanding that the sales process is a two-way street. Instead of simply sending a message, the goal here is to build the relationship between the brand and the customer so that they feel like they’re part of a community.

Challenges and Limitations of the 4 Ps of Marketing

Even though they’re considered foundational knowledge in business and marketing, the 4 Ps are not without their drawbacks. So far, we have been attempting to answer one question: what are the four Ps of marketing? However, you can’t fully answer this without talking about the drawbacks. By learning about these, you’ll be more cautious and well-poised to work around the issues with the framework.

Focus on Tangible Goods

There’s a reason that one of the 4 Ps is product instead of product AND service. With the former, the factors associated (the other 4 Ps of marketing) are more straightforward. However, with services, the things you require for strategy formulation are a lot more complicated. In such cases, the customer experience is more important. Unfortunately, this is not addressed by the original 4 Ps of marketing. That’s why 3 more Ps were added: People, Process and Physical Evidence. These are designed to make the marketing applicable to both products and services.

Oversimplification of the Marketing Process

The 4 Ps assume that the marketing process is very simple:

Create a product;
Decide on a price;
Choose how to distribute the product;
Promote the offer.

However, with the heightened level of interaction allowed through digital marketing, the 4 Ps of marketing can’t capture everything. For example, consumers are now active participants who can be involved in promoting the offer. So, if we were to blindly follow the framework, we’d be missing out on a lot of opportunities to improve the bottom line.

The Need to Adapt to E-Commerce

At the time the framework was created, they couldn’t have predicted how complicated the market would become. And while the 4 Ps of marketing worked in the past, there are now practically endless ways that transactions and marketing can happen. For example, the concept of place changed from simply being a physical location. Now, at least as far as the internet is concerned, location can mean anywhere both in physical and virtual spaces.

Another important difference is how advertising is done. The consumers themselves can also take part in advertising through user-generated content and influencer marketing. Meanwhile, the 4 Ps are fixed on the brick-and-mortar model. While developments have been introduced (like the 4 Cs and the 3 additional Ps), the original version needs to be revised to better suit the modern world.

4 Ps of Marketing in Action: Examples and Case Studies to Use for Inspiration

Despite the potential drawbacks and weaknesses, there are still solid reasons that business owners apply the 4 Ps of marketing. To help you appreciate the value of this model in the modern world, let’s talk about how every element can also be applied to digital marketing. As you’ll see, we’ll go beyond what the original 4 Ps of marketing taught us. In the examples that we’re about to show you, technologies and online platforms were heavily leveraged to achieve exceptional campaign outcomes.

Product – Netflix as a Pioneer in Online Subscription-Based Services

Netflix is a great example of an excellent application of the 4 Ps of marketing, but in this case, we will focus on the first P: Product. With your monthly payment, you not only have access to thousands of movies and TV shows to watch online you also get the following:

Original Netflix-created content;
AI-driven recommendations;
Enhanced user experience through cross-device compatibility and offline downloads.

With its amazing offer, it’s no wonder Netflix has seen an all-time high in its stock price!

Price – Spotify’s Freemium and Dynamic Pricing

Spotify is a subscription-based music streaming app that maximizes revenue from its worldwide market. It has achieved this by applying the second of the 4 Ps of marketing. Spotify has the following:

A permanent freemium offer that lets users access the entire catalog but with ads;
Regional pricing, where they adjust their rates based on the paying capacity of the different markets;
Discounted student and family plans.

Spotify holds the spirit of the 4 Ps of marketing by providing value while still maintaining affordability across all income levels.

Place – Amazon’s Accessibility

Amazon is the largest e-commerce platform in the world. You can purchase practically anything there. In the digital world, they demonstrate how the third of the 4 Ps of marketing is implemented by:

Being a convenient place to buy many different items;
Having a user-friendly platform for both desktop and mobile devices;
Being available in many places around the world;
Providing fast shipping services.

The expert who conceptualized the 4 Ps of marketing may not have had this in mind. However, as you can see, Amazon makes purchasing both highly convenient and accessible.

Promotion – Domino’s Launch in Indonesia

MGID has applied the last of the 4 Ps of marketing in its Domino's case study. At the time, Indonesians preferred to call to place their food delivery orders; however, Domino’s wanted to increase its online presence. Staying true to the Promotion aspect of the 4 Ps of marketing, MGID created ads designed to appeal to a wide range of audiences. These ads led to a landing page where users could see exclusive offers and place an online order.

Using the Promotion aspect of the 4 Ps of marketing, we received 160,700 clicks, achieved an average clickthrough rate of 0.70% and maintained a cost per click of just $0.03.

What Are the 4 Ps of Marketing? Your Framework to Success!

This framework has long proven its universal applicability. That’s why, decades later, many marketers and business owners still refer to the 4 Ps of marketing when creating their marketing strategy. Of course, you still need to consider the various ways the industry has grown since the 4 Ps’ inception. For example, the 4 Ps of marketing were limited by the technologies available at the time the idea was conceived.

Today, thanks to advancements like native advertising, there are fewer barriers to achieving success. If you want access to superior tools, creative resources and a personal manager to implement the 4 Ps of marketing, sign up for MGID. Let us help you generate consistent and sustainable growth and success!