Marketers are becoming increasingly focused on promotion at the expense of price, product and place. Why is this and what are the consequences?
Gather a bunch of marketers in a room, ask them to distill the profession down to its core fundamentals and it won’t be long until someone mentions the 4Ps of marketing. When it comes down to it a marketer will always be defined by those four things: promotion, product, price and place.
Except are they really? Marketing Week’s exclusive 2025 Career & Salary Survey found most marketers hold very little sway over the 4Ps at all. Just 34.1% of the more than 3,500 marketers who responded to our survey have influence over pricing. Fewer still are involved in discussions over distribution (32.7%) and less than half are involved in product development (48.5%), an area where most would consider the involvement of marketing to be crucial.
But there was one P where marketers still hold great power – the P of promotion. Nearly nine tenths of the total sample (88.7%) have control or influence over advertising and communications. This holds true across B2B (89%) and B2C (90.6%), and whether you are a SME (88.3%) or larger business (89.7%). Put simply, for most marketers it’s the 1P of marketing and very little else.
From Marketing Week:
