Are the 4Ps still relevant? You have to be joking.

The fact that a title asking, 'Are the '4Ps of marketing' still relevant?' appears on a website like Marketing Week just points to the desperate state of marketing today. If you do not get the 4Ps right you might as well donate your marketing budget to charity. It will generate a far better return that way.

Yes, I know, the world is in changing, everything is going digital, but one thing remains constant; people do not buy your marketing, they buy your brand. However, they may buy your brand because of its marketing. Ultimately brands create value for their owners because people find brands valuable – they solve problems, they meet needs, they satisfy desires – and only very rarely is marketing alone going to create enough value in its own right to make a sale (and even then it is likely a short-term win). The primary role of marketing is to enhance brand value, not create it; to improve perceptions of value and encourage people to buy.

I think there is a pervasive belief in the industry that the only job of marketing is to publicize a brand and encourage purchase. Opinions differ on how to do that, there are some who will argue that mental availability is all that matters, and there are some that will argue that only brand love matters, but implicit in these arguments is that marketing is somehow separate from the nature of the brand itself, and that all you need to do is to get people to want to buy the brand. Not so, you also need to encourage people to pay the price asked.

I find it alarming that, in an admittedly unscientific poll, one in three Marketing Week readers claim not to want responsibility for pricing. Do they not realize that pricing – and how well a brand justifies its price point – is critical to how profitable a brand will be? Deny responsibility for pricing and the brand is likely to end up churning volume but not making any money. However, perhaps more concerning is that only two in five readers claim they have responsibility for pricing. That means that three out of five are trying to enhance brand value with one hand tied behind their backs.

Ultimately, I do not believe there is no substitute for a well-crafted product or service to build a strong brand, but how people respond to that experience is malleable, a combination of expectations, impressions, and physical experience. It should be the job of marketing to help craft the optimal combination of expectations, impressions, and experience to encourage purchase and justify the price asked, and you cannot do that without paying attention to the 4Ps.

So, to confirm, a strong brand needs to be based on the following foundational 4Ps, 

1. You must create the expectations of product performance, and ensue the actual experience delivers on those expectations.
2. You must set the right price point, and justify why it is worth paying that price compared to cheaper alternatives
3. You must make sure your brand is readily available, when and where people might need it or think to find it, online or off
4. You need to promote your brand, so that it is salient when a relevant need or occasion arises, and motivating impressions come to mind

Now you could add a bunch of other Ps to the mix: people, packaging, and, ideally, profit. But unless you get the first 4Ps right, you can forget the others too.

But what do you think? Please share your thoughts.