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Does Marketing only control one of the 4 Ps?

October 5th, 2009 by Pam Carvell, Marketing Consultant · Email This Post Email This Post · Print This Post Print This Post
Topics covered: Marketing Definitions

Marketing has traditionally been defined as the 4 P’s i.e. product, price, place, promotion. With the growth of Revenue Management, much of the responsibility for price and place now sit in this function. Marketing has always had limited involvement with the product, often being ‘presented’ with the product by Operations.

That leaves Marketing only being responsible for Promotion. That’s how Marketing was back in the 1970’s, when it essentially meant advertising and brochures. The function evolved, with people even adding responsibility for 2 more P’s i.e. People and Profit.

Is this a good or bad thing?

Does it mean that Marketing can concentrate on what it does best and not be distracted by pricing, profit etc, or will it produce a fragmented approach to the marketplace, with confused customers?

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2 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Mark White // Oct 12, 2009 at 4:35 pm

    I think that the development of the social media aspects of marketing and PR will lead to a shift in emphasis and certainly the need for a greater level of coordination between the different elements. With the customer having an increasingly prominent role to play in all of the the “marketing P’s”, we may well find that an internal allocation of these 4 elements becomes essentially irrelevant.

  • 2 Rob Baldry // Oct 14, 2009 at 12:06 pm

    Does the marketing function only control one of the 4 P’s ? Sometimes. Should it ? No. If a marketing function is going to be effective, it has to have influence over all 4 P’s and has to be concerned with the broader business objectives, especially profitability.
    In a hotel group structure, I would argue that the marketing function should be responsbile for not just the marketing communications team, but also revenue management, branding, product development and even sales, which I see as a function of marketing (but then I am a marketing person !). This way a marketing team can work well to coordinate all aspects of the 4 P’s to hit the business objectives. Some larger hotel groups do work to this sort of principle and do it well. It also often occurs successfully in independent hotels, where there are fewer team boundaries that can get in the way of all the disciplines working well together.
    It would be a shame to regress to the times when the marketing team were just the people you contacted when you wanted an advert produced, or a new brochure …

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