Is a lack of oversight over the 4ps – beyond just promotion – holding back marketers’ careers?

Only a third (34.1%) of the more than 3,500 marketers responding to Marketing Week’s 2025 Career & Salary Survey either personally, or within their team, have influence over pricing. When it comes to place, just 32.7% report having any influence over distribution strategies.

While more have influence over product and service decisions (48.8%) and new product development (48.5%), this still leaves more than half of marketers without a say in product.

These numbers are stark, particularly when contrasted with the vast majority (88.7%) of marketers having control over advertising and communications.

Most marketers don’t have influence over the 4Ps excluding promotion

Marketers have long worried their roles have shrunk to just one P – promotion – and it may be holding back their careers.

Jon White, former chief marketing officer at RS Group, believes it’s having a negative impact.

“There’s a double-edged sword in the middle” of the problem, he tells Marketing Week. “Which is, if marketers are not growing up having been exposed to pricing, how could they lead pricing? It’s self-fulfilling.” A lack of exposure early in marketers’ careers to product, price and place means they’re unlikely to be given access to it later on.

White says he sees this problem “all the time” in businesses. “You get people saying, ‘Why would we give pricing to marketing? They haven’t got any skills or experience’,” he says.

But what these business leaders are actually saying is, “I don’t trust marketers to have the experience to be that commercial,” White adds.

“As marketing leaders, we have a responsibility to have this debate with the industry and with the function and go, what are we going to do about it?”

Growing up in silos

There is a concern that marketers are specialising in their careers too early. “People are growing up in silos, and they don’t see other silos as part of what they do and should do,” says White. “Fundamentally, my big agenda item is, if you want to do marketing, you’ve got to accept that you need to be a business person.”

For marketers looking at their potential career paths, the first issue may be not being a well-rounded marketer, which leads to the second issue of not being a well-rounded business leader.

“You need to learn all the things somehow, and bang the drum, and don’t just accept and give in, to get that experience. Go find it, go get it, go build it,” says White.

“Think ‘I’ve got to build myself as a business person’ because even if you don’t end up as the CEO, you’ll be a far better marketing leader by being a business leader first.”

Marketers’ lack of control beyond promotion is something Sarah Robb O’Hagan views as a worrisome issue for the industry.

You need to learn all the things somehow, and bang the drum, and don’t just accept and give in, to get that experience. Go find it, go get it, go build it.

Jon White

Robb O’Hagan is a marketer-turned-CEO who has held senior marketing positions at the likes of Virgin Atlantic and Nike before moving into general management and taking on roles such as president at Gatorade, president at Equinox and CEO of Flywheel Sports.

Sometimes, marketers forget that “the point of marketing is the 4Ps”, she says. “And I actually think if you have experience in all of them, you are generally going to be very well prepared to be CEO of a company that is looking for consumer-driven growth – no one’s going to have more experience than you.”

However, few have the groundwork to set them up for long-term business leadership success. Despite believing in the power of marketers to lead business, Robb O’Hagan says: “I do worry a lot about marketers who want to eventually move into general management, CEO-type roles.”

If marketers are pigeon-holed into communications, “it’s going to be very hard to be seen as someone who can come across to run the whole business,” she says.

Be intentional

Reflecting on her own journey from marketing into leading large businesses as a president and CEO, it was in being “intentional” with her job moves that helped Robb O’Hagan get to the top spot.

“You have to be intentional and choose to move to the side early in your career to get more P&L experience,” she explains.

As a marketing director at Nike in her late twenties to early thirties, Robb O’Hagan recalls hitting a fork in the road. “I could have taken a job the next level up, a promotion in marketing, or I could take another job that was at the same level,” she says.

The latter job was a general management role overseeing a smaller US business region, she explains. “I remember it was such a fork in the road, because you emotionally want to take the bigger job, more influence, more money.”

It was a toss-up between climbing a clearer, marketing-focused career ladder, and moving to gain “a whole different skill set” with responsibility for sales, HR, finance and all other functions beyond marketing. She made the move.

The forgotten P? What marketers can bring to ‘place’ strategy

Robb O’Hagan emphasises that for marketers moving horizontally in their careers outside of marketing, it doesn’t mean cutting ties with the function.

“Funnily enough, after that job my next job was a CMO, so I went back into marketing. It didn’t stop me from doing that, but it did pave the way for the CMO to become the president of a giant business, because they could see back in my career, I had this experience running the full P&L,” she says.

Perhaps the marketing industry has a different promotion problem, suggests Robb O’Hagan. It’s an industry that “loves to promote itself” whether through top CMO lists, awards or LinkedIn.

“People are constantly feeling this need to get recognised within marketing, and I’m like, don’t let that be a reason you wake up and go ‘Oh shit, I waited too long to try and get some of these formative experiences’,” she urges marketers.

However, she emphasises that marketers have “amazing skills” for general management, and shouldn’t “miss the opportunity”.

Are marketers sacrificing strategy as tactics take over?

Another marketer who has made the move into general management before returning to marketing is Nuria Hernández, chief marketing officer for Unilever Personal Care.

She spent nine years outside of marketing in general manager and president roles at Unilever, most recently as general manager for Personal Care in Latin America and Brazil.

Reflecting on her path into general management, she says: “I don’t think there is a good or a bad path for your own career, but I think what helped me shape my own career has been being able to think forward and imagine myself where I want to be in 10 years’ time.”

My biggest advice to a marketer would be to early on in your career, try to experience different things, so you understand where your passion is, and understand if you want to be on a more generalist career path.

Nuria Hernández, Unilever

Hernández believes that picturing your ideal future career can help marketers make better choices earlier on. It ensures she creates “the right ecosystem of roles, people and projects around me to learn and keep on moving,” she says.

She sees marketing career paths as split in two: “One of them takes you to be a specialist, and one of them takes you to be more generalist”. It’s the latter that leads to general management, and the path she carved for herself.

“My biggest advice to a marketer would be to, early on in your career, try to experience different things, so you understand where your passion is, and understand if you want to be on a more generalist career path,” she says.

Broad experience is a key factor, she adds. “For me, it’s less about having deep experience in one thing, but creating a lot of experiences around different things, and being able to connect the dots.”

Marketers make strong business leaders, and she emphasises that if marketing is “really well understood” by research and development, supply chain and other teams, it can help brands win.

“I think today, more than ever, when we see marketing and commerce really blending very fast, it is very important that our marketers understand that as much as we need to create passion for our brands, desire for the brands and innovation, we need to understand how commerce works,” she adds.